Famine in Ireland

To return to a topical issue, isn’t this why imperialism is worse than (most) dictatorships? The English ruling class *had* to care about whether the English poor were starving, but it didn’t have to care about whether the Irish were.

True, imperialism is no worse in this respect (and maybe better) than rule by a neighbouring and hostile ethnic group.

What does Niall Ferguson have to say on the subject?

Of course, one can be against imperialism and imperial double standards– and can be sympathetic to the plight of poor people– without being in favor of welfarism.

Sympathy means fuck-all if you tie your hands behind your back and refuse to do something about the problem with whatever tools are at your disposal.

It’s now hypocrisy to be sympathetic to the plight of poor people while opposing welfare statism? What an interesting world we live in…

A government with policies explicitly denying people the right to own land based on their religion and ethnicity…. protectionist agricultural price controls…. massive taxation to fund make-work programs paying below-market wages…. deflation caused by restrictive new credit policies….

I hope Sen (or Bertram) is not attempting to imply that the Irish of the 1840’s lived in a free-market system IN ANY WAY comparable to that of the modern United States. To do so would be horribly offensive to the multitudes of Irish killed by Britain’s genocidal policies.

I also hope that believers in free markets will not take the bait and attempt to defend British policies toward Ireland.

There is a name for the kinds of famine that were endemic to the British empire in the nineteenth century — from Ireland to the series of famines that killed, conservatively, ten to fifteen million in India from 1876 to 1910: terror famines. Conquest’s term, which implies that famine can be a state policy, has so far been applied solely to the Soviet Union, and Stalin’s decision to use famine to re-organize economic relations in the Ukrainian and Russian countryside. But Stalin was merely following in the path of the Britich governments of 1848 and the policy of Viceroys like Lord Lytton in India in 1876-8. Mike Davis’s Victorian Holocaust is a great source of information about this — although Davis rather misses his analogy, comparing British policy to the Nazis when the Nazis were using starvation solely as a genocidal tool. Like Stalin, the Brits simply wanted to impose a new form on an agricultural society, and thought it was worth a couple million worthless peasant lives to do so. Capitalism, like Socialism, begins with some form of central planning, contra Hayek.

Great topic.

has so far been applied solely to the Soviet Union

Actually Sen comapres the Ukraine and Bengal famines himself, in the very book under discussion.

Paul Dunne of the Shamrockshire Eagle found a contemporary piece by a Randian (apparently of Irish nationality, believe it or not)which blames the potato-eating Irish for their own fate. Of course any good freemarketer must praise famines, which are a good way of reducing the costly burden of excess labor capacity. You only want so much of that reserve army. Derbyshire didn’t have the guts to say so, though.

http://internetcommentator.blogspot.com/2003_11_23_internetcommentator_archive.html#106993587653753080

http://shamrockshire.yi.org/

I hope Sen (or Bertram) is not attempting to imply that the Irish of the 1840’s lived in a free-market system IN ANY WAY comparable to that of the modern United States

I note in passing that the UK of the 1840s had a lower ratio of tax to GDP, lower tariffs and far fewer regulations than the United States. It was much, much more comparable to a laissez-faire state than the modern USA.

I’ve written a bit about this elsewhere —

Famine

— so now an attempt to expand on that and comment on some views expressed here. I’ve just made some points as they occur to me, so apologies it what’s below is a bit disconnected.

In the first year of the hunger, the British overnment, more specifically the responsible minister, Russell (? I think), did belatedly attempt to buy some quantities of Indian corn on the American market, only to find that the French and various German governments, among others, had already bought up the surplus to feed their hungry poor. Since Ireland had no government, her hungry poor went unfed. Russell’s bumbling was bad enough; but then came the change of ministry, and Trevelyan. The problem with him was, he used Ireland as an experimental subject on which to try out policies which would have been unthinkable in England — because *there*, he was answerable for his actions. He did not have it in his head to starve the people. He merely thought he’d leave laissez faire to do what it could.

It is however true to say that the focus of British policy in Ireland was to control the *effects* of what was even then regarded as a “natural disaster”, to alleviate the symptoms rather than cure the disease, and above all prevent the effects of the disease from spreading to “the mainland” . Thus, shipping off the afflicted to the new world, doling out enough soup to keep the poor from literally starving to death (the mass of unburied corpses would have created a serious public health problem is a country already ravaged by various types of “famine fever”) — and all the while exporting food from a country whose inhabitants could not pay for it. For food prices had (of course) soared. Even some of the well-off peasantry found it impossible to buy eatables, and these formed a goodly part of the later waves of emigration.

Even if prices had been stable, the lack of a developed money economy in Ireland — one consequence, among other things, of decades of forcing down the living standards of the peasantry — meant that once the staple crop failed, there was no alternative to mass charity. It wasn’t only that the poor had no money — though what money there was generally had to be used to pay the rent, — but also that there was often nothing to buy. The lack of a means of distribution may have been as big a factor as the price of the food.

Why did the people starve? In essence, because the economy was under-developed. Why was the economy under-developed? Because it was distorted by the connection with Britain. Not only foodstuffs, but capital was exported from the country — indeed, extorted, as Marx describes. I don’t know that Marx writes about the Famine per se anywhere, but what he says on Ireland *after* the Famine is germane, and well worth reading:

Ireland After the Famine

Remember, the social conditions that led to the Famine continued for several decades after it, and there were several famine scares during that period. Perhaps only the continued decline of the population through emigration averted another “clearance”.

The whole affair in retrospect has a sense of inevitability about it, the logical end result of decades, indeed centuries, of British policy in Ireland. To consider simply the policies of Russel and Trevelyan in isolation is to miss this wider meaning.

I’m not sure, by the way, that we can speak of Stalin’s *decision* to cause famine in Ukraine, any more than we can speak of Trevelyan’s decision to let famine be in Ireland. But actions speak louder than words. It is the results of policy that matter, regardless of subjective intention. Both famines took place, both famines were due to state policy; whether or no it was the intention of individuals within those states to cause what they in fact made happen is surely secondary.

The Great Famine is proof beyond doubt, for all those with eyes in their head, that the connection with Britain was (and, I would say, still is) disastrous for Ireland. Whether it can be called genocide is a moot point. Certainly, the effect was genocidal: the extirpation of the remnants of Gaelic Ireland. If this was not deliberate British policy, it certainly served such policy remarkably well.

And, finally, it’s somewhat typical of the weblog world that Derbyshire’s lightweight article is regarded as a serious account of the Famine. Ms Solent would have done better to visit her local library and borrow Woodham-Smith’s “The Great Hunger”. But then, that presumes that she really wants to learn and not simply to have her prejudices confirmed.

zizka: Of course any good freemarketer must praise famines, which are a good way of reducing the costly burden of excess labor capacity.

Is it too late to qualify for the 2003 Straw Man Awards?

Derbyshire didn’t have the guts to say so, though.

If you honestly consider Derbyshire a “freemarketer”, read this. If you think the distinction is trivial because they’re all just “moronic brownshirt ****s”, I can’t help you.

dsquared: I note in passing that the UK of the 1840s had a lower ratio of tax to GDP, lower tariffs and far fewer regulations than the United States. It was much, much more comparable to a laissez-faire state than the modern USA.

Are we talking about the UK, or are we talking about an oppressed territory OF the UK whose citizens were not afforded the rights of UK citizens?

Chris Bertram: Since I didn’t mention the US in my post and Sen is not discussing the US in the passages mentioned, I’m inclined to diagnose this comment as an acute case of Carly Simon syndrome.

The relevant language in your post was, “Blaming the victim, bad choices, poor diet — I’ve heard those explanations before somewhere.”

It seemed me that you were referring to the two recent threads on Sen, in which you referred to American capitalism as “manifestly defective”, and commenters questioned how Sen differentiated between the health effects of genuine poverty (which clearly exists in the US) and the effects of bad choices in diet (which also exist in the US).

On the subject of famines, can I recommend Alex De Waal’s ‘Famine Crimes’? An excellent, contentious book, which devotes much of its first chapter to a discussion of Sen.

One of De Waal’s theses is that Sen’s refutation of the Malthus/Senior explanation of famine (which Sen mischievously labels ‘FAD’ or ‘Food Aggregate Deficit’) was in fact anticipated in all essentials by the British Raj’s Famine Codes instituted in India (from, I think, 1861 onwards). It seems reasonable to assume that the recent Mutiny had had a lot to do this; perhaps also the change in governing institution, from the East India Company to the Indian Civil Service.

And he further points out that the Famine Codes were anticipated in all their essentials by at least one surviving manual of government from pre-Raj India. A very interesting point, with a lot of implications: one of which is that British administrators in India, some of whom would have done Political Economy as part of their Greats courses, could in fact use their understanding of classical economics to evolve an analysis of famine that went strongly against Malthusian orthodoxy. Furthermore, their policy response combined price controls, anti-profiteering measures, public works, welfare and other extensive interventions in the workings of the market. It would be interesting to know how much impact this had on economics as it was taught back in British universities.

It’s also worth noting that the motive force behind Parnell’s Land League was fury at the famine, and fear in the early 1860s that there would be another famine- hence the Land League slogan ‘Never Again’, and hence the British agrarian reforms of the 1860s. Again, when faced by effective political pressure, British Imperial administrators became pragmatic interventionists pretty damn quickly.

[CB as moderator: deleted a final paragraph which constituted a further attempt IMHO to provoke an irrelevant flame-war with another commenter. Like I said — if you want to do this, rent your own bandwidth]

Dan Hardie’s comments provide a lot of food for thought — unfortunate as that cliche is in this context. Sen’s thesis, I think, is that famine is a crisis moment within the larger development of a particular set of policies. In India, and in Ireland, those policies had to do with land tenure, taxation, and the British desire to tear down barriers to the exchangability of land property and goods. It was, in fact, the desire — in accordance with the latter principle — to monetize the economy, in India, that lead to making taxes payable in specie. This tore at the heart of the traditional system, in which taxes were paid in-kind. In order to have the money to pay the taxes, the peasantry were forced to borrow it, at exorbitant interests, from a class of lenders that the British encouraged. This, in turn, destroyed the incentive to stock reserves of grain — which, of course, was the point. Eventually, the point was to make it possible to transfer property for money. In effect, the British administration was trying to transfer the Agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century in the West, which did monetize property, to India.
Personally, I think this point is fascinating. Since Hayek’s influential book, The Road to Serfdom, central planning has come to be defined exclusively in terms of the positive regulations implemented by the state concerning the production and tranfer of goods and services. This, of course, ignores the historic fact of central planning as a series of changes in a society wrought by changes in the legal structure of that society (which is, by the way, going on in Iraq). That the laissez faire utilitarians that created and implanted a legal code for India (from Macaulay to James Fitzjames Stephen) were engaged in central planning is a paradox only because of the way in which we’ve arbitrarily narrowed the semantic reach of the term.

Was the same thing going on in Ireland? That’s a good question.

Ryan asks,

Are we talking about the UK, or are we talking about an oppressed territory OF the UK whose citizens were not afforded the rights of UK citizens?

No, we’re talking about the UK. At the time of the famine, Ireland was one of its constituent countries. The Irish were UK citizens afforded the same rights as other UK citizens. The penal laws that disabled Roman Catholic Irishmen disabled Roman Catholic Englishmen as well (and, I might add, at times also disabled some protestant Irishmen as well, though to a far smaller degree).

Through a mixture of neglect, malevolence and stupidity, the government of the day turned what should have been a serious but containable agricultural problem into a social and moral catastrophe. The history of English mismanagement of the famine is quite grim enough. There is no need to descend into inaccurate 800-years-of-Saxon-oppression rhetoric in describing it.

So the Irish died because they were Catholic, and not because they were Irish. Even though some Protestant Irishmen were also harmed. Because after all, Catholic Englishmen suffered too.

Well. That puts a whole different complexion on the matter.

No, Zizka; the Irish died because their sole staple crop failed and they hadn’t the means to buy alternative food. So they starved or, more usually, died of diseases they couldn’t fight off in their weakened state.

The famine didn’t particularly care about their religious denomination. RCs being both the majority of the population (esp. in the hardest-hit regions of the west and southwest) and the majority of the poor, they died in much heavier numbers. But protestants died as well. John Barkley, once moderator of the Irish presbyterian church, described his grandfather, who survived a famine childhood, as an old man who’d pick up any stray potato he found at the edge of a field and take it home in his pocket, because you never know.

The religion of the victims is neither here nor there. You are confusing the famine and the penal laws. The famine came nearly a half century after the Act of Union that made Ireland part of the UK. At that time UK law imposed disabilities on RCs without regard to whether they were Irish or English. Nearly all of these laws were gone shortly thereafter; the last major disability was the ineligibility of RCs to parliament (catholics had got the vote itself years earlier). And that disability was removed in 1829.

UK governance in the first half of the 19th c. was certainly ghastly by today’s standards. But Ryan simply has his facts wrong in suggesting that Ireland was at the time an ‘oppressed territory of the UK’ whose residents were ‘not afforded the rights of UK citizens’. Ireland was part of the UK and the Irish were citizens with the same rights as all other Britons (as the Irish then were); the legal disabilities abridging those rights for some citizens did so on the basis of their religion, not on the basis of their nationality.

All catholics in the UK suffered from legal discrimination, whatever their nationality. All of Ireland suffered in the famine, and poor prods were as prone to death as poor catholics; I don’t think RC Englishmen were much affected. Not a different complexion on the matter; these were two different matters altogether.

Mrs T: yes I see what you mean. Though I think I’m making the same point as Chris here; the discriminations made which could be said to have caused the famine were not ones which a movement in the direction of laissez-faire would have got rid of.

Derbyshire:

“What a dreadful human calamity might have been averted if the U.S. authorities had had the wit to ban the export of infected potatoes! Why did they not do this? In part, for the same reason that the British government did not organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving: it was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments to do such things in the 1840s.”

Sen: “…by the 1840s, when the Irish famine occurred, an extensive system of poverty relief was fairly well established in Britain, as far as Britain itself was concerned…”

Whether there is a contradiction between these two passages depends on how one interprets Derbyshire’s phrase “such things.”

This is a very weak example of Derbyshire’s “awful”-ness, and an even weaker example of the sort of “misinformation” that gets “circulated” around the “blogosphere.”

I found the piece quite interesting and Chris Bertram’s attack on it excessive.

You are both surely wrong. Derbyshire’s entire point rests on the unsupported (and false) assertion that the British state was not in the business of large-scale provision of food to the hungry. If he’d troubled to look this up in a decent textbook he’d have found it was wrong. He therefore either didn’t bother to do so or ignored it. Chris’s very mild claims are entirely appropriate.

dsquared: it is possible that Derbyshire meant “such things” to include “large-scale provision of food to the hungry.” But it is also possible that he meant something closer to what he actually wrote–i.e., that “it was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments” to put themselves out much “while Irish people were starving.”

Whichever way you take it, this is hardly his “entire point,” or even his main point in the passage in question, which concerns the failure of the U.S. to impose an agricultural quarantine.

Derbyshire comes closer to saying what Chris Bertram wants him to say earlier in the article:

“There is no doubt…that the British governing classes of the 1840s included many [heartless] men…and their heartlessness is the main indictment against them. It had a number of sources. One was plain despair. For years before the famine it was perfectly obvious that Ireland was heading for a demographic catastrophe. Everybody knew this, and many said so…. From 1801 to 1841, the Catholic population of southern Ireland quintupled. A thing like that is hard not to notice. And yet, within the political thinking of the time, nobody, not even the best-intentioned and most charitable observers, could think of anything to do to avert the coming disaster. Britain was a minimum-government state, ill-equipped for the sort of speedy, wide-scale relief the situation called for.”

But even this is arguably consistent with Sen’s account. The English could well have a “system of poverty relief” that was “fairly well established in Britain” while still being “ill-equipped,” materially and ideologically, to deal with the massive emergency in Ireland.

Derbyshire goes on to emphasize the ideological point: “Economic ideas, too, contributed to the general callousness of the authorities. This was especially true after the Tory administration of Robert Peel, which actually did attempt some substantial public relief, gave way to Lord John Russell’s Whig government in 1846. Lord Russell held to a very pure version of laissez-faire economics, which tolerated as little government interference as possible.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t think that in this particular article Derbyshire comes across as some sort of extreme right wing moral monster. In fact, I would expect the Crooked Timber folks wholeheartedly to agree with his conclusion:

“To say that governments were not equipped for these tasks does not, of course, absolve them of moral responsibility. Twenty-two centuries before the famine, the Chinese philosopher Mencius wondered rhetorically: “What should we think of a ruler who allows his people to starve?” What then should we think of Robert Peel, Lord Russell, and their administrators? These men were responsible for the citizens of the United Kingdom, which at that time included Ireland. They were responsible to provide for their defense in case of invasion, and for their relief in case of natural disasters — the most elementary functions of government. They failed in that responsibility. They — and, to a lesser degree, the authorities of New York and the United States — must forever bear the stain of the famine.”

Daniel Davies wrote:

You are both surely wrong. Derbyshire’s entire point rests on the unsupported (and false) assertion that the British state was not in the business of large-scale provision of food to the hungry.

That is only one of many possible interpretations but it is not what he actually said:

“What a dreadful human calamity might have been averted if the U.S. authorities had had the wit to ban the export of infected potatoes! Why did they not do this? In part, for the same reason that the British government did not organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving: it was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments to do such things in the 1840s.”

There is nothing in this excerpt from Derb’s article saying that the British government did not have any sort of relief for its own citizens, but merely that it did not “organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving” and that it “was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments to do such things in the 1840s.”

It could just as easily mean that the British government’s nature was not to help out the Irish hungry even though it provided some relief for its own hungry people (which seems consistent with Sen’s excerpt).

Or it could mean that while they had some programs (e.g. Poor Laws) they were not adequate to deal with the problem in Ireland because they were more localized or on a smaller scale (as were the ones in the United States which predated the New Deal).

It does not follow though that Derb’s categorically stated that there was not any form of governmental relief even though in terms of philosophy and resources, they were most certainly more limited than what we have today.

The assertion that Chris and Daniel attribute to Derb’s point is merely their interpretation of what he could have meant rather than what he actually wrote. If someone wants to accuse him of making up stuff as was the charge, then it might help to actually find something more concrete and less vague to critique.

Chris Bertram: you ended your original post with these words: “Blaming the victim, bad choices, poor diet — I’ve heard those explanations before somewhere.” And then Ted Barlow tittered in sympathy.

I was assuming that you were drawing a parallel between Edward Trevelyan’s rhetoric and that of the conservatives who commented on your first post on Sen’s book a few days ago. But when those conservatives talk about bad choices with respect to poor diet, they are thinking precisely of the epidemic of obesity, with all it’s attendant health problems, that notoriously afflicts America’s lower classes. In that context, your parallel makes no sense unless you see junk-food addicts as victims.

But perhaps you didn’t realize what the conservatives on that thread were talking about–which might actually make the indignation with which you greeted their remarks more comprehensible to me.

Incidentally, I have had several discussions lately with people on the left who *do* see Big Macs, potato chips, and Coca Cola as forms of victimization. If you and Ted Barlow do not think that way, then I am relieved to hear it, and sorry that I mistook your meaning.

Textual note:
Derbyshire wrote, “In part, for the same reason that the British government did not organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving.”

If this sentence is grammatical, “while Irish people were starving” modifies “prevent the export of foodstuffs…” and not “organize adequate relief.” In order to make it modify “organize adequate relief” Derbyshire would have to eliminate the comma before “or” (or perhaps insert a comma after “Ireland”).

So Chris Bertram and Daniel Davies appear to be right that Derbyshire seems to spread misinformation about the British government’s ability to do poor relief at the time.

As for the question of whether Derbyshire is vile, I think that can be settled without reference to this article.

Matt Weiner: you cannot possibly believe that the phrase “organize adequate relief” is not intended to refer to Ireland during the famine.

Chris Bertram: actually, I think that poor diet came in third behind high rates of homicide and HIV infection in those conservative explanations for excess African American mortality.

I am a little surprised to learn that you do not accept those explanations *even in part*. I had assumed your position was that, while these white/black differences are real, they should be seen not as a product of “choice,” but of past and present victimization–slavery, Jim Crow, ongoing discrimination, etc. Which would bring us back to the idea that when American blacks die at disproportionate rates from, among other things, heart disease and stroke brought on in part by poor diet, they, like the Irish in the potato famine, should be seen as victims.

If you do *not* think that African Americans suffer from higher rates of homicide, HIV infection, heart disease, stroke, etc., and that thiese factors do not largely account for their higher mortality rate, than I guess I just don’t know what to say.

As for “the Reaganite indifference toward AIDS victims in the early 1980s”…well, I have probably already annoyed you quite enough for one day.

Chris Bertram: fair enough. I agree that dietary factors are probably relatively unimportant. And it is much more plausible to present black homicide rates as a form of victimization. (Not necessarily right–just plausible.) Differential HIV infection rates are iffier–choice? victimization? I dunno. And I’ve been there. Lots of personal experience with that one–more’s the pity. Anyway, thanks for your interesting and patient responses.

P.S.: few neo-cons harbor much affection for John Derbyshire. I don’t know whether or not Thorley Winston is an exception to that rule, but I suppose *he* knows, and can speak for himself. You’re right, of course, about the “inventiveness of Straussians when it comes to reading texts.” Another thing I’ve experienced at first hand. Feh. I just don’t think it’s relevant here.

Matt Weiner: I haven’t seen the “anti-Chelsea Clinton screed”; it’s hard to imagine how anything that could reasonably be so described could fail to be awful. Same goes for hit-pieces on Dubbyah’s unfortunate offspring.

The Malthusian explanation is not very plausible. The population of England experienced the same kind of exponential growth, especially in the eighteenth century, without famine. But during that same century, and on into the nineteenth, the English had done their best to decimate Irish industries (as they were also doing to the Indian textile industry), and drew away the capital that could be invested into agricultural improvement into English ventures. Angus Calder’s book, Revolutionary Empire, cites a whole literature of English military and government men mulling “removing” the Catholic Irish — in fact, the war against the North American Indians came out of the same mindset, and was often strategized by the same thinkers (Walter Raleigh, for instance), who floated schemes to make Ireland Irisch-rein. This is the long, tedious and disgusting background to the Victorian Irish policy.

Does this mean that famine in the 1840s was intended? No, but it does mean that there was a whole cultural bias against helping the Irish, and there were goals that could be met by weakening the Irish. That Irish protestants were caught in the net, too, isn’t really relevant. The great Anglo-Irish landholders of the Pale weren’t, and they certainly saw a point in evicting tenants and destroying the intricate net of customary tenants’ rights that bound them in their dealings with the peasantry.