Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory - Paperbackby Cormac . Grda (Author) Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Grda's new work, the advent of