Ireland lost one in three people in the late 1840s. At least a million died in the famine and its related illnesses; another two million fled for Britain, Canada, the United States or other ports as refugees or as they are described these days, "economic migrants".
The colonial nature of the Irish economy exacerbated the food shortage. Anglo-Irish landlords, given their land in “plantations” after decades of war in the 16th and 17th centuries to displace conquered Irish Catholics, were a big part of the problem. At least a quarter were absentee and only wanted the highest rents they could gouge; resident landlords preferred “conspicuous consumption” – Ireland enjoyed a million acres of deer parks and gardens – to building the infrastructure of modern agriculture.
So British leaders wanted to use the famine “to modernize the Irish agricultural economy, which was widely viewed as the principal source of Ireland’s poverty. The famine response was seen by some as a deliberate form of ethnic cleansing, driven by centuries of crippling prejudice against Irish Catholics but others say it isn’t genocide when authorities don’t act to stop the deaths of people we don’t care about in the first place.
One of the main villains, Charles Trevelyan, the British Treasury assistant secretary whose anti-Irish moralism thwarted relief, old a colleague: God “sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson…and it must not be too mitigated.”
The Irish economy was backward and precarious, but for Trevelyan the failure of the potato crop presented not a life-or-death crisis but an opportunity to forcibly modernize it. He agreed to a limited public works program (in which out-of-work laborers were paid a pittance to build roads to nowhere) because he believed it would break the peasant class of its reliance on barter and subsistence farming. The idea was to sell them corn imported from overseas because the grain couldn’t be cultivated in Ireland, thereby accustoming them to using money. However, when Ireland’s mercantile men objected to the price-depressing effects of government-funded grain, Trevelyan vowed not to sell it too cheaply, claiming that high prices would promote foreign imports.
It was particularly easy to see the hand of God in the potato blight, because the potato was at the root of the lazy culture of the “aboriginal Irish,” according to Victorian moralists. “Why did the Irish have ‘domestic habits of the lowest and most degrading kind…more akin to the South Seas…than to the great civilized communities of the ancient world?” Potato dependency!” writes John Kelly, author of “The Graves Are Walking."
“The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, leave the people to indolence and vice,” wrote one man in charge of Irish relief.
“Food for the contented slave, not the hardy and the brave,” the Economist rhymed about the Irish staple. Thus the failure of the potato crop was God’s way of getting lazy landlords, and more importantly, the “aboriginal Irish,” into the modern age, where they’d either work harder for better crops, or preferably, leave the farm, enter the emerging industrial society and earn wages to buy food, rather grow their own. These strategies amount to the 19th-century version of what Naomi Klein has dubbed the “Shock Doctrine”: an attempt to force economic reforms on a population reeling in the aftermath of a disaster.
It didn’t work that way: relief efforts and public works projects were opened, and then closed, because of worries about “dependency,” that those starving, rag-wearing slackers might prefer the dole to working. To justify shutting down aid mid-famine, the London Times editorialized that it was to help the poor Irish themselves. “Alas, the Irish peasant has tasted of famine and found it good…the deity of his faith was the government…it was a religion that holds ‘Man shall not labor by the sweat of his brow.”
“There are times when harshness is the greatest humanity.” The Times’ “chief proprietor,” John Walter said. He put it more crudely in Parliament (he was also a Tory MP). ”The blacks have a proverb,” he explained. “ ‘If a nigger were not a nigger, the Irishman would be a nigger.’ ”
Anglo-Irish landlords evicted tenants rather than pay a higher poor rate for them; there was no one to plant the next season. Finally they opened the poor houses more widely, and they became teeming vectors for spreading disease, most notably “famine fever” and typhus, killing people more quickly. some Irish leaders veered into crazy anti-British conspiracy theories. John Mitchel, who claimed the British government created typhus in laboratories and deliberately infected the Irish. Centuries of oppression can lead to some wild, intemperate ideas. Yet the culprit was capitalism. Irish grain was being loaded onto ships bound for England as Ireland’s starving masses watched speaks of the landowners’ indifference to anything but their own income.
Adapted from here
The colonial nature of the Irish economy exacerbated the food shortage. Anglo-Irish landlords, given their land in “plantations” after decades of war in the 16th and 17th centuries to displace conquered Irish Catholics, were a big part of the problem. At least a quarter were absentee and only wanted the highest rents they could gouge; resident landlords preferred “conspicuous consumption” – Ireland enjoyed a million acres of deer parks and gardens – to building the infrastructure of modern agriculture.
So British leaders wanted to use the famine “to modernize the Irish agricultural economy, which was widely viewed as the principal source of Ireland’s poverty. The famine response was seen by some as a deliberate form of ethnic cleansing, driven by centuries of crippling prejudice against Irish Catholics but others say it isn’t genocide when authorities don’t act to stop the deaths of people we don’t care about in the first place.
One of the main villains, Charles Trevelyan, the British Treasury assistant secretary whose anti-Irish moralism thwarted relief, old a colleague: God “sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson…and it must not be too mitigated.”
The Irish economy was backward and precarious, but for Trevelyan the failure of the potato crop presented not a life-or-death crisis but an opportunity to forcibly modernize it. He agreed to a limited public works program (in which out-of-work laborers were paid a pittance to build roads to nowhere) because he believed it would break the peasant class of its reliance on barter and subsistence farming. The idea was to sell them corn imported from overseas because the grain couldn’t be cultivated in Ireland, thereby accustoming them to using money. However, when Ireland’s mercantile men objected to the price-depressing effects of government-funded grain, Trevelyan vowed not to sell it too cheaply, claiming that high prices would promote foreign imports.
It was particularly easy to see the hand of God in the potato blight, because the potato was at the root of the lazy culture of the “aboriginal Irish,” according to Victorian moralists. “Why did the Irish have ‘domestic habits of the lowest and most degrading kind…more akin to the South Seas…than to the great civilized communities of the ancient world?” Potato dependency!” writes John Kelly, author of “The Graves Are Walking."
“The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, leave the people to indolence and vice,” wrote one man in charge of Irish relief.
“Food for the contented slave, not the hardy and the brave,” the Economist rhymed about the Irish staple. Thus the failure of the potato crop was God’s way of getting lazy landlords, and more importantly, the “aboriginal Irish,” into the modern age, where they’d either work harder for better crops, or preferably, leave the farm, enter the emerging industrial society and earn wages to buy food, rather grow their own. These strategies amount to the 19th-century version of what Naomi Klein has dubbed the “Shock Doctrine”: an attempt to force economic reforms on a population reeling in the aftermath of a disaster.
It didn’t work that way: relief efforts and public works projects were opened, and then closed, because of worries about “dependency,” that those starving, rag-wearing slackers might prefer the dole to working. To justify shutting down aid mid-famine, the London Times editorialized that it was to help the poor Irish themselves. “Alas, the Irish peasant has tasted of famine and found it good…the deity of his faith was the government…it was a religion that holds ‘Man shall not labor by the sweat of his brow.”
“There are times when harshness is the greatest humanity.” The Times’ “chief proprietor,” John Walter said. He put it more crudely in Parliament (he was also a Tory MP). ”The blacks have a proverb,” he explained. “ ‘If a nigger were not a nigger, the Irishman would be a nigger.’ ”
Anglo-Irish landlords evicted tenants rather than pay a higher poor rate for them; there was no one to plant the next season. Finally they opened the poor houses more widely, and they became teeming vectors for spreading disease, most notably “famine fever” and typhus, killing people more quickly. some Irish leaders veered into crazy anti-British conspiracy theories. John Mitchel, who claimed the British government created typhus in laboratories and deliberately infected the Irish. Centuries of oppression can lead to some wild, intemperate ideas. Yet the culprit was capitalism. Irish grain was being loaded onto ships bound for England as Ireland’s starving masses watched speaks of the landowners’ indifference to anything but their own income.
Adapted from here
No comments:
Post a Comment