Note that the Irish famine was so severe only because the English accepted Malthus' theory that human populations would expand to the carrying capacity of the land and then die back in famines. Therefore intervening would just lay the groundwork for a larger, later, famine.

Nobody at the time had come to terms with the fact that improvements in agriculture had massively increased the carrying capacity of the land. Whether we eventually are forced into famine or manage to curb populations before that point is still uncertain. But there is no question that the English could have intervened, stopped most of the casualties, and there would not have been a quick recurrence of the famine.

FWIW and from what I can tell, that is 1 million out of a total Irish population of 6 million at the time (1845, Wolfram Alpha), versus 36 million out of a total population of 682 million (1960, W.A.). So in 1 in 6 vs 1 in 20.

So one could argue that the Great Famine was a much more widespread (factor 100 population), but less severe (factor 1/3 mortality) catastrophe. Disregarding all other factors such as causation. The "baseline" mortality due to starvation may also have been different in both instances.

Of course such number games are both cynical and insufficient to deal with the subject (e.g. your point 2).

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Dikötter's 2010 work Mao's Great Famine, seems like a very similar book with very similar conclusions.

As long as we're playing number games, the combined population of Ireland and the UK was 28 million in 1845 according to WA. If we're going to blame the UK, we should probably include citizens of the UK in the tally. Really, it's hard to make a direct comparison since it appears to me that we're trying to compare a problem in a single province controlled by the UK and a general problem across all of China. If Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, and India had all had huge famines in 1845 that might be a little more comparable to the Chinese famine.

But as you say it's not incredibly instructive to look at it by the numbers.

Not sure why the downvotes, but it's true. Ireland was an occupied state, and most of its food production went overseas to the UK. Including England in the total population makes no sense.

I was using province in the classical Roman sense. Ireland did not have self-determination.

Removing England from the tallies would be like removing members of the Chinese communist party from the population of China. You're basically making the tacit assumption that the oppressors had no right to the food and therefore the fact that they did not have a famine is irrelevant. There's an interesting argument there, but you're not actually making it, you're just manipulating the numbers to tell a specific story.

The whole of Europe had potato crop failures at the same time, but only Ireland had famine. Imagine, in China's case that xighur had a famine while the rest didn't. Now does it make sense to include the whole country in the statistics?

You might as well include France in the stats too...