The Economist and the Irish Famine

The horrid aspect of British colonialism is that they treated Africans and Indians as if they were Irish.

“It would be unjust to Ireland Greece – it would be a neglect of a great duty which is imposed on us at this time – if…”

Hey, ECB, come and get some splendid boilerplate!

“From the review, it doesn’t look like the policies to combat the famine could fairly be considered laissez-faire and not recognisably Smithian either.”

Ah yes, real “laissez-faire” has never yet been tried … don’t people ever get tired of this ?

Damn, messed up that link. Can someone fix it, please?

“the Irish were weak, sick, and starving, and so making them do hard labour to get their relief was probably the worst thing you could do at that point.”

Sounds like Stalin and Hitler could have learned a thing or two from Mr. Trevelyan. Indeed may be they did. First exploit the natives anti revolutionaries etc until they die; while blaming them with racist propaganda for their temerity in dying from your policies.

We have the same today in modified form in England with the Government demonising the disabled, sick, and unemployed with planted stories in the Daily Mail to justify cuts in tax for the striving millionaires. But I suppose at least Bengal will not have to endure accidental famines at the hand of absent minded British civil servants.

“Ah yes, real “laissez-faire” has never yet been tried … don’t people ever get tired of this ?”
Its really not even close in this case. Public works designed to increase overall welfare is one thing, but just for the sake of employment – not laissez-faire at all.

“British policy towards its near-forsaken neighbour”

A curious turn of phrase, since Ireland, at the time, was not a British neighbor, but an integral part of the United Kingdom, and its ruling Protestant Ascendancy, crowding the native Irish peasant off most of the arable land, constituent parts of the British upper classes, well represented in both Houses of Parliament and among the officers of the British Army.

Another interesting turn of phrase, later in the article:
“. . . the free market economics that Britain tried, and failed, to apply to Ireland’s problem . . .” Wait, they tried to apply free market economics, but failed to apply free market economics — that’s the Economist’s story? I guess so, because this ambiguous sentence follows shortly thereafter:

“The question remains as to whether misguided ideology of a previous era can be found culpable of a greater evil.”

Will we now have a theory of a greater evil to excuse market liberalism, to go with the theory of lesser evil to justify Obama?

The Irish famine was due to laws and policies that benefitted British landowners.

Um, no, not really. The land system in Ireland benefited no-one and the British despised it; the tenant farmers were locked in to a system of property rights which gave them no compensation and no security, and many of the landowners were deeply in debt due to the poverty of their tenants. It was a dysfunctional system of property rights that needed restructuring.

And I think you’ll find what solved the land issue was not some nebulous idea of “free trade”, but a) the change in landholding patterns after the famine due to emigration (and, y’know, death), and b) the land reform policies (the famous “three F’s”; fixity of tenure, free sale, and fair rent) agitated for and won by the Land League in the 1880s. Protectionism and tariffs are really second-order problems regarding the famine and land question in Ireland.

I suppose you can claim that the restructuring of landholdings due to the demographic crisis was caused by a relatively “lassez-faire” approach to dealing with the famine, but that’s the opposite of what you’re arguing, and I don’t think anyone really likes a policy with the cost of a million lives.

Also Nick’s explanation makes no sense when you consider that, as has been noted, during the latter half of the 19th century there were a number of quite awful famines in India which killed millions, well after the repeal of the Corn Laws and during the period Nick is claiming that the “landed interest” had been eroded by free trade.

In fact, the only major famine in India which there was little excess mortality is the Bihar famine of 1873-74, where there was an extensive famine relief effort. Indeed, the Lieutenant Governor was criticised for excessive spending, despite this success; the relief efforts of the Great Famine of 1876-8 were paltry in comparison.

(and, of course, there’s a reason why it’s called the “Great Famine”)

This way of thinking has deeply roots in the predestination faith, as the malthusianism and social darwinism itself also have (and may be the whole concept of darwinism). All of this are also in the roots of the Ricardo’s “Iron Laws” and in general in their “dismal science”

Father Malhus provided some good arguments to sustain the poor’s laws, and others ways to avoid the “exponential growth” of population, because the “inherent depraved nature” of poors made charity an error that only delay the “natural and inevitable” (darwinistic) adjustment in their numbers

If the poors are, at the same time, catholics, well….

No, I’m pretty sure you’re right about that. (Or Graeber’s right? If he commented on Ireland specifically somewhere, I missed it.) But that’s no excuse for uncritically throwing terrible terms like “barter economy” around in current scholarship.

I myself wonder how a nation dependent primarily on one crop for its food supply (so dependent on this crop that its absence creates a terrible famine) indicates a “market” of any kind, let alone a “free market.”

Right, because the Brits went through Ireland seizing whatever food anyone had on hand?

Yes.

The British did not actually *cause* the potato blight.

The British are not oomycetes, that’s true. Did someone argue that they are?

The British government was responsible for the famine.

Anderson: Right, because the Brits went through Ireland seizing whatever food anyone had on hand?

Bruce Wilder, responding: Yes.

From that handiest of sources, just as a starting point:

Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–1783, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.[64]

Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland as “the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation.” Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.[fn 4]

Christine Kinealy writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. However, the poor had no money to buy food and the government then did not ban exports.[66]

Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine.

See also Shaw, in Man and Superman.

MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on disappointments in love than on disappointments in money. I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I’m talking about. Me father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47. Maybe youve heard of it.
VIOLET. The Famine?
MALONE [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full o food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. Me father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in me mother’s arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep Ireland. Me and me like are coming back to buy England; and we’ll buy the best of it. I want no middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector.

The country’s official name was the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, suggesting that there was a specific difference between “British” and “Irish.”

There may have been, but I think the naming thing principally might just reflect the fact that the two islands (as geographical entities) have those names. The cut between member and other seems to run within the Irish (and maybe within other constituent nationalities of the UK at the time) rather than between British and Irish. So lots of posh Protestant people (Burke for example, though that’s complicated) could be insiders.

“And I think you’ll find what solved the land issue was not some nebulous idea of “free trade”, ”

Seeing as various of you know a lot more about this than I do, a question.

I’ve heard it said that the real, ultimate, cause here was the English insistence that the Catholics follow Catholic inheritance laws. As in (not that these are specifically Catholic but….) all children get a claim to an equal part of the real property of the estate. Estate might not be quite the right word for a 2 acre smallholding but….

Protestants however could follow the English rules of primogeniture.

It doesn’t take too many generations of such different inheritance laws for the Catholics to all be on half acre plots and the Protestant estates to remain at however many tens or hundreds of acres they started out as.

The aim of this policy being, in a time when ownership of land equalled power, to reduce the power of the Catholics over time. Or to convince certain of the grander families to convert.

I really don’t know whether there’s any truth to this idea. I can see that it makes sense (not that it makes sense as in being a good thing to do but it explains what actually happened). And around me here in rural Portugal I can see certain similar effects on land holdings. More importantly here it’s on buildings: you can and do end up with 10 or 15 grand and great grandchildren all having a claim on a house of the recently departed. And that makes it extremely difficult to reach agreement for it to be sold on to some other person who might actually use it (to the point that parts of Lisbon really do suffer from this problem, buildings falling over as the family squabbles).

As I say, I’ve no idea though whether it’s actually true. Even, did the English really impose such different inheritance laws?

Anyone actually know?

(Re, “The English”, “Catholics” etc. Yes, I’m English myself, part of that Irish Catholic diaspora although in my family case leaving Ulster in 1921)

I totally want the same PR department Imperial Britain hired to whitewash their record. When a famine happens in a Communist country it’s all, COMMUNISM = NAZISM MASS MURDER TENS OF MILLIONS SLAUGHTERED, but a whole lot of famines that happened under British rule are mysteriously lost to memory.

Er, I think quite a lot of people still remember the Potato Famine. The Irish one, that is. You won’t find many people remembering the Highland Famine that cut the region’s population in half. Lot of empty villages up there in the straths; lot of Destitution Roads.

Re Tim @35 – yes, the punitive laws insisted that Irish divide their inheritances equally. Some 18th century ones also forbade Irish to own a horse worth more than a certain amount, to own arms and so on. And the Test Acts prevented Catholics from entering the professions, while a policy systematic of dispossession aimed at forcing Catholic gentry into exile (where they formed regiments in the Austrian, French and Spanish armies, and made significant contributions in those states and also in Russia). The Irish could then be despised as poor and ignorant.

It seems there’s a movie in production about the Ottoman Empire’s notorious attempt to interfere in the melancholy necessities of a starving Ireland:
http://irishhungercomm.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/turkish-producers-work-on-irish-great-famine/

Grant@41: A quick look at secondary sources suggest effective state intervention in the 1782 Irish famine, the 1879 Irish famine, and the 1873 Bihar famine. But it looks like part of the problem is the contra-factual nature of your request: Before the 20th century, when the state intervened successfully, no one called it a famine.

The Economist has a review of two books on the Famine in the most recent issue. … It’s genuinely good to see The Economist publishing a piece directly acknowledging how radical free market dogmatism led the British government to respond so badly to the starvation of a million of its own subjects.

Might I point out that the review in question is actually a blog post, not an article included in the print edition.

Grant @41, Yes, and probably a huge number that you haven’t heard about because famines were prevented. For example Chinese dynasties maintained a vast infrastructure of government storehouses which were used for this purpose, and this is reported by travelers from C & W Asia. Amartya Sen in his book on famines mentions that the Mughals had something similar.

[Although known for his Presbyterian work ethic, Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President Henry A. Wallace, whose improvements in corn breeding made him a millionaire while still young, was nevertheless derided as “the dreamer.”]

In the spring of 1944, Wallace had been pondering the “dreamer” issue when the snippet of a poem came to mind.

I am tired of planning and toiling
In the crowded hives of men,
Heart-weary of building and spoiling
And spoiling and building again.
And I long for the dear old river,
Where I dreamed my youth away,
For the dreamer lives forever,
But the toiler dies in a day.

The poem was called “The Dreamer,” Wallace had heard it many years before from an old friend, Des Moines lawyer Addison Parker. In a spare moment Wallace wrote a note to Parker asking whether he still remembered it. Parker sent back a copy of the poem, written by John Boyle O’Reilly, along with a letter recalling how he’d heard it. As a young man Parker had gone to hear Williams Jennnings Bryan when the famed populist spoke in Des Moines in 1909. Bryan observed that he had been called a dreamer and quoted the poem in response. Parker continued,

Bryan then went on to say something to the charge of being a dreamer like this: “However I am not willing to rest my defense on what might be termed poetic license, so I have turned to the Book which I always turn to confound my enemies and confuse my critics—the Bible, and I find there was more than three thousand years ago a man by the name of Joseph of whom his brothers said, ‘Let us kill him for he is a dreamer of dreams.’ But fortunately for them and their people they did not succeed in their murderous designs and seven years later they went down to Egypt and brought corn of the Dreamer to feed their starving people!”

“Don’t be disturbed if you are a voice crying in the wilderness,” Parker told Wallace, “Because you may recall that the first voice that cried in the wilderness is still echoing through the ages and until it is heeded there will be no peace, I fear, in this troubled world.”

If Wallace was disturbed, he gave no sign of it. He dreamed on.
—John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer, a Life of Henry A. Wallace (New York: WW Norton, 2001), pp. 329–330.

Tim:

As far as I can tell, the provisions of the Popery Act of 1703 which forced Catholics to inherit by gavelkind were more or less repealed by 1778 (and the penal laws were never uniformly applied). Certainly, by the time of the famine there were plenty, although not a majority, of Catholic landowners.

Plus, the issues with the land tenure system I’m talking about are much further down the line, at the tenant and sub-tenant level, where there was little incentive for the tenant to improve their land due to short-term leases and lack of compensation for improvements. There was also a considerable concentration, rather than fragmentation, of land holdings at the very top: around 800 families owned 50% of the land. I suppose you could make the argument that the penal laws facilitated this concentration, which after all was mostly in the hands of the Protestant Ascendancy.

The point I’m making, though, is that all of this, which did contribute significantly to how bad the Famine was (there was little to no Famine in Ulster, where due to the policy of plantation tenant farmers had more rights), has little to do with the repeal of the Corn Laws, and what changed it involved collective political action.

I have never understood how Adam Smiths policy prescriptions around the repeal of the corn laws could have possibly helped in the case of the Irish Famine. Even if we ignore the various imperialist policies, AS main argument around the corn laws was that grain spulators helped to insure that food prices evened out by buying where there was a surplus (and prices were low) and selling it where there were shortages (and prices were high). But that assumes, in typical classical tradition, that its all about supply and demand for one good.

In the Irish famine (and many others) the problem was that the farmers whose potatoes failed had no crop to sell, so they had no money to buy the otherwise sufficient food. The increase in exports from Ireland is a natural response by “rational” homo-economicus-type food traders – if you can get a better prices in London than you can selling to starving Irish peasants, you sell it to London (and as I understand it, this has happened in many famines).

If anything, the Irish famine is an example of why Smiths arguments around speculation are wrong.

In fact all leasehold property continued to descend as personalty – and thus to be subdivided – right up until the passing of the Succession Act in the 196os which brought new rules into force for all property. Lands acquired under the various Land Purchase Acts (the former tenant holdings) also, by virtue of the 1891 Registration of Title Act, continued to descend as personalty.

Only freehold property passed on death to the “heir-at-law”. This would have included holdings under renewable leases for lives, somewhat popular at least up to 1829 since the holder had a vote if the holding was worth 40 shillings and in the era before O’Connell generally voted as the landlord directed. After 1829 most of these were probably converted to ordinary leases as they fell in and would have become subdivided where inherited, but there hardly was much time between then and 1845 for all that many subdivisions. (No idea what proportion of holdings they constituted.)

If I remember correctly, the repeal of the Corn Laws is generally thought to provide a motive to landlords in the post-Famine period to “clear” the land of many of the labourers and tenantry, no longer required for the work of tillage since the less labour-intensive grazing of animals for export is now more profitable. During the Famine it seems to have been considered that the Corn Laws were detrimental to the starving since they kept up the price of grain and encouraged its export from Ireland to its neighbour. The repeal in 1849 would seem to have been too late to make any difference there.

(hoping this comment doesn’t get eaten a third time)

On successful responses to famines, the Roman answer isn’t so much the steady policy of the emperors that Juvenal mocked, it’s more late republican responses to famine in the city of Rome that led to the institutionalization of that policy. The great organizer and administrator Pompey had a lot to do with that.

More to the point might be whether the Romans did anything like that outside the city of Rome. I seem to recall something from graduate school days in Pliny or Dio about an effective government response to a famine in Bithynia that involved taking on the grain merchants who were stockpiling grain waiting for the price to rise while there was rampant starvation, but I couldn’t quote a source now.

Are we really talking about “Catholic” inheritance law? It seems quite different from the Spanish property law that still influences property holding in California.

And since Henry Wallace has come up, I discovered on our cross country trip summer before last that the people of Iowa have erected an appealing monument to him at one of the rest stops we hit.

Don Boudreaux on the same topic reaches, predictably, the opposite conclusion.

Freshly Squeezed – Boudreaux is literally correct that repeal of the Corn Laws was partially in response to the famine. Parliament passed the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and the sponsor of repeal, Sir Robert Peel, argued strenuously that repeal was necessary in order to mitigate the famine.

But immediate and full repeal could not pass, so the bill that did pass phased repeal over three years, so that wheat imports continued to be taxed until 1849. And in any event the starving Irish had no money to buy wheat or bread or any other food. To the extent repeal helped at all, it was in making relief efforts sponsored by the church and the government a little cheaper.

A slight aside here, but it is truly shocking how little of the Irish potato famine is taught and known in Britain. I did my History GCSE on exactly this period in Britain – we covered enclosure, industrialisation, the Corn Laws – but narry a mention of the famine.

I’d say if non-historians know anything about it, it’s generally along the lines of “Irish potato famine, lots of Irish people dead, British government didn’t do well”. And most people don’t know anything at all.

It’s nealy always this way with Irish/British history though. Mention Cromwell and most British people will mention the Civil War, Roundheads vs Cavaliers, that sort of thing. If you bring up Ireland and the New Model Army, the vast majority won’t have a damn clue what you’re talking about. Some will think you’re talking about 80’s pop music.

There’s a shameful, wilful blindspot about the treatment of Ireland by Britain – and by Britain I really mean England. I don’t know why, although I do have some vague thoughts about distance and guilt.

And in NY a few years ago, IIRC, they made it compulsory for public schools to teach the potato famine as a deliberate act of genocide…

“A slight aside here, but it is truly shocking how little of the Irish potato famine is taught and known in Britain”

Bizzarely, in Ireland its not taught at any level in school either (as far a i can remember)

Katherine, my experience of school, and of the adults of my generation I have met from Britain, is that the UK’s entire colonial past is basically not taught at school, and for most people in Britain the entire empire is a case of “we did some bad things, but they’re all better off for it now.” It’s just the same as the knowledge Australians “of a certain age” have of the genocide there. It’s probably different for kids going to school in the UK now, though, just as it is in Australia.

While the “genocide” label for the great famine seems excessive (it was more “put the brutes on a diet” than exterminate them) the unpleasant demographic problem of Catholic Ireland was neatly and fortuitously dealt with, and partially thanks to the merits of the free market. Today the population of the UK excluding Northern Ireland is about ten times that of the island of Ireland, in 1841 it was only twice the population of its troublesome western neighbour.

To be more exact in 1841 the population of England, Scotland and Wales came to about 18.5 million while Ireland’s was 8.1 million. An annoyingly large proportion of these 8.1 million were not just illiterate savages but illiterate Catholic savages of questionable loyalty. The famine led to an astonishingly long period of population shrinkage in Ireland as these ne’er believe wells first died and then emigrated. In fact Ireland’s population only stopped decreasing in around 1967, 115 years after the end of the famine.

Quite an advertisement for the benefits of laissez faire and the policy prescriptions of The Economist.

There’s a shameful, wilful blindspot about the treatment of Ireland by Britain – and by Britain I really mean England. I don’t know why

Because we’re still there?

I changed schools between the second and third years of secondary school; we didn’t have a National Curriculum in those days, so when I started the new school I was ahead of everyone else in Latin, way behind in Chemistry, and had a big gap in my mental history of Britain, stretching roughly from St Augustine to the Old Pretender. I’d love to know how I would have been taught the Civil War. I get the impression there’s a certain nervous reticence about the regicide and the Commonwealth, for very much the same reason as there is about Ireland.

Bizzarely, in Ireland its not taught at any level in school either (as far a i can remember

It may have been a teacher going off-script, but I was certainly taught about it at roughly age 10. It was given in the Feckin’ Cromwell narrative.

“That’s not really true, but not completely false. … On the senior secondary school curriculum the Famine is compulsory AFAIK, but many students will have dropped History by then.”

Yeah that seems a more nuanced take, although it appears from the LC syllabus you linked to that you can pick your topics so you don’t cover it? We definitely didn’t anyway (in the 00s) as far as I can recall..and instead spent a disproportionate amount of time studying the life of Charles De Gaulle .. but maybe it’s changed since then. (Although the syllabus looks familiar)..or maybe our teacher just taught what he wanted?..(I’m after confusing myself)

BTW, a novel set during the famine that is worth reading is My Dream of You, by
Nuala O’Faolain.

“As genocide goes, that does seem rather incompetent.”

This is a line I have used in threads about the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which have seen explosive population growth since 1967. Deaths from Israeli acts in Gaza and the West Bank are counted in the thousands over a period of forty-five years. Life expectancy and per capita income in the occupied territories are comparable to neighboring Arab countries. You can argue that the that the recent attacks on Gaza are war crimes; that the settlements are illegal; that the occupation is a form of apartheid; but it’s not possible to argue with a straight face that Israel is engaged in genocide.

Ireland is a different story.

Between one and two million Irish-speaking people died of starvation and disease in a period of a few years. The culture and society of their country were irrevocably changed. Their language was effectively extinguished as a language of daily life. Villages disappeared from the map as large stretches of the west and southwest were depopulated. As the emigration of able-bodied young became the rule, the population of the Ireland went into steep decline, decreasing for almost a hundred years, from 8 million in 1845 to 4 million (for the entire island) in 1940.

The potato blight hit all of northern Europe, not merely Ireland. Yet in Belgium, Prussia, and other countries where the poor were reliant on the potato, the death toll was measured in the thousands or tens of thousands, not in millions. In these countries, population growth was barely disturbed and ordinary country life resumed once the blight ended. But Ireland was changed forever. In Ireland, the land that had supported millions of rural poor was cleared and converted into fields for export crops.

It is plausible that the Irish famine resulted, not from intentional English malevolence, but from a combination of natural causes, bad luck, incompetent administration, false ideological and political beliefs, religious and linguistic discrimination, and widespread indifference. If so, the famine probably does not meet the legal definition of genocide, which requires the ”deliberate infliction” of conditions of life that are “calculated” to bring about the physical destruction of a people, in whole or part. Simply allowing people to starve, even as food under armed guard is transported out of their country, probably does not qualify as genocide.

So the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, during which millions of people starved as soldiers stole their grain, was legally a genocide, while the Irish famine, in which soldiers kept people who had nothing to eat away from the food that would have saved them, perhaps was not.

But the Irish famine, by an uncanny fortunate coincidence, was extremely beneficial for a rapidly industrializing England, as it turned Ireland into the breadbasket that English cities needed, while supplying the cheap labor for the dirtiest and poorest-paid jobs that those cities created.

Fascinating discussion in the comments and original post. Many thanks to all. I’ve just been reading about the famine in Cecil Woodham-Smith’s “The Great Hunger”. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this harrowing episode in world history. It’s very readable considering the subject matter. Woodham-Smith’s account very much accords with the general tenor of the comments here, namely that the laissez-faire principles of the government of the day meant their response to the crisis was a terrible failure. It just makes you think on (and give thanks for) the rise of the labour movement because it is impossible to imagine a (democratic) government responding to a famine within its borders in the same way today.