My understanding is that while Britain wasn't the direct cause of the famine itself (that is, they didn't specifically introduce a pathogen that would fuck up their major crop), they were largely responsible for explicitly refusing to help and making the situation worse.
I'd be more shocked to find out that Britain in the 19th century made things better in a region with famine.
> they were largely responsible for explicitly refusing to help and making the situation worse.
Moreso than that, they exacerbated it. The British farmer barons refused to lower their demand on their crops to allow the Irish to consume them in lieu of their lost crops. In addition, they were the ones that pushed heavily for a monoculture on potatoes and a few oats over a diverse agricultural landscape; which allowed the famine to get so widespread.
In other words, the Irish Famine wasn't any worse than most contemporary famines. However, it was a death toll for the Irish because all of the grown food was shipped over the North Channel (or you were imprisoned/killed for refusing to cede it).
There's a reason the (catholic) Irish hated the British so fervently and it was 100% due to liberal involuntary servitude punishments, Cromwellian policies, and the Black 47.
> In addition, they were the ones that pushed heavily for a monoculture on potatoes and a few oats over a diverse agricultural landscape; which allowed the famine to get so widespread.
That doesn't mesh with what I've read. The English were generally derisive of the Irish's reliance on potatoes. But the Irish became reliant on potatoes because of the shrinking size of the average tenant farmer's allotment. Potatoes are labor intensive but produce a higher number of calories per area of land than others staple crops, especially on marginal land.
I gave the short version. Your outline of consequence and effect is correct.
The British demanded specific oats and other crops, which required large allotments; this left the Irish farmers with a small portion of land to grow their own subsistence on, in turn leading to Potatoes as the only option (ending in a monoculture). When the potatoes started dying, the Irish had no access to the other crops (as they were grown for the tenant holders).
> My understanding is that while Britain wasn't the direct cause of the famine itself (that is, they didn't specifically introduce a pathogen that would fuck up their major crop)
There's a historical grey area here. India had experienced the conditions of their famine before, as you might expect, things happen more than once and so they had a social structure agreement between villages where ones who's crops were stricken and lost would have their food stocks supplemented with those of neighboring villages, and every village grew more than they needed to facilitate this. This worked excellently for probably thousands of years, until the Brits arrived and insisted taxes be collected, and they took crop yields in lieu of money the Indians didn't have.
Either they were unaware because they assumed the brown people had no idea what they were doing, or they were aware and didn't give a shit because the people were brown, or some combo of the two, who's to say. But they did the very same to the Irish. Landlords were entitled to the yields of their land, and they took whatever it produced, which exasperated the already dire situation.
I don't know, it's been a while since I've read on the subject, but I thought part of what drove the Irish to subsisting off of a monoculture was somewhat driven by necessity from the english consolidating lots of holdings to english lords and collaborators, tax policies shaping what little output they had left basically meant with the amount of arable farm land available to the Irish, it was only the surprisingly effective potato that could keep up.
If that recollection is correct, then while the english might not have lit the metaphorical fire, they definitely gathered the kindling.
The pathogen affected all of Europe but only Ireland suffered a famine. So, blaming the pathogen on its own is not convincing. British policy did play a central role.
As a matter of law, the Irish were not allowed to own land. They could only rent a limited amount from landowners -- 0.5 acres at most, if my memory serves. And the only culture with a sufficient yield per unit of surface that the Irish could both make rent and feed themselves was the potato.
The rest of the land served to produce other crops for the benefit of British landowners. As a result, the island of Ireland was in fact producing enough food to feed its population through the Famine. It was just exported to Britain instead.
It's so trendy to blame everything on the British. Downside of being the local (or global) power; everything is your fault. Probably they should have helped more, but so should have everyone.
It'd be one thing if they just didn't help more, but they actively exacerbated it. There was food in Ireland, it just wasn't for the Irish. From the article:
> The problem was not that the land was barren.... But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. ... In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland “rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce.”
I want to set aside for the moment the fact that the land-owning class was English (and not Irish) -speaking and usually lived in England, because while that's the easier point to make, there's a more fundamental issue here that I think is important, and would be true regardless of whether the ruling class was Irish or English: What was the mechanism that allowed the ruling class to do this? They clearly didn't have the support of the Irish people; absolutely everyone who starved would have obviously preferred a system where they could eat the food they were growing, so why didn't they just do that? Where was the monopoly on violence, which prevented these farmers from eating, based out of? The framing of "the British didn't cause it, they just didn't do anything to help" ignores the glaring fact that "not doing anything" would have meant "not enforcing their colonial power", when they most certainly did actively maintain their control, and it was precisely that control that enabled this to both happen and to continue. Were they trying to kill the Irish? No, but if you could solve a problem like a famine by simply ceasing to enforce a certain set of laws, but you continue to do so anyway, you are very obviously still responsible. If a school bully threatens violence to make sure his lackeys can sell your lunch, and he says "The lackeys are in charge, you should have brought more if you wanted to keep some," that doesn't mean he's not the one making you go hungry.
> In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England.
A snippet from the snippet you apparently neglected to read.
Well the brits have a history full of very bad things. They were treating other countries and nations in a very very bad way. Up till this day people are suffering from those actions.
French and Germans were not depicted in English publications as apes.
The Irish were coerced into the UK and were officially British citizens, that is ostensibly, co-nationals. They weren't treated as such because those in power regarded them as subhuman. If that isn't racism the word is devoid of meaning.
Kind of. There is a quote from Lord Thomas Macaulay in 1835, regarding education in colonial India, that I've always found interesting:
> I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
In 1835, it's quite progressive to posit that you can, through education, create a class of Indians who are "English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Arguably, it was too optimistically progressive--history showed that Oxbridge educations could go only so far in turning Indians into English.
it's not even remotely progressive; it's the standard "white man's burden" horseshit that was prevalent at the time, positing that englishness was a higher state of civilisation that indians needed to be educated to attain.
In 1835, England already had inter-city railways and most textile mills were using steam engines. If you were an Englishmen in 1835, you'd absolutely look out at India and see English civilization as being from a higher state. And, based on the empirical evidence before your eyes, it would be extremely progressive of you to posit that the difference between you and those Indians was something that could be bridged by education.
Yes, absolutely. But at least for me it was shocking to learn that Ireland, right next door to Britain, was suffering from similar famines to India.