This is a story about Ireland.
And it’s a story about an event that you’ve probably heard of, but might not know much
about.
It’s usually called, quote, “the Irish Potato Famine.”
In most history books, the Irish Potato Famine doesn’t get a lot of attention.
At most, it appears as a pretty simple story to explain Irish migration abroad.
In the beginning, Irish people depended on the potato for food; then, there was a potato
disease; many Irish died, and others migrated abroad on what they called quote “coffin
ships” – to England, Scotland, Australia and North America.
But the story of the famine is a lot more complicated – and a lot more disturbing
– than that.
It was much less “natural” and much more “artificial” than you might think.
And it all goes back to a man named Thomas Malthus.
Malthus was a British economist, a very influential one.
And in 1798, Malthus published a book called, quote, “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”
And in this book Malthus put forward an influential idea, and a rather counterintuitive one.
Malthus said that when food production increased, people were better off for a little.
But that improvement led to an increase in population, which eventually caused societal
problems: there were too many people, and not enough food to go around.
Poverty and famine were the natural results.
Like animals, Malthus said, humans had a certain “carrying capacity.”
When it exceeded that carrying capacity, enough people would die to return the population
to a natural equilibrium.
So in the nineteenth century, that so-called “Malthusian” model became the conventional
wisdom in European intellectuals.
It led them to focus on what they called “overpopulation,” and made them basically think of famine as
nature reducing population to a sustainable level.
Not that the Malthusian idea was really correct.
No serious economist today will tell you that having “too many people” is the reason
people are poor or hungry.
In 1981, the economist Amartya Sen explained the real cause of most historical famines.
If you look at the historical record, Sen said, a collective lack of food is never the
real problem.
The cause of famines – while it often has something to do with a decline in agricultural
production – is more related to the unequal DISTRIBUTION of food: there’s enough food
for everyone, but some people can’t exchange what they have for that food.
Sen found that famine is usually not the result of “too little food,” but of exploitation
and unequal economic relations.
That brings us to Ireland in the 1840s.
Here you have a perfect example of exploitation and unequal economic relations.
Irish people were the “other” against whom the British could define themselves:
they were viewed as lazy, barbaric, barely human.
Ireland itself was run as a colony for the emerging class of British capitalists.
While England was rapidly becoming the wealthiest country in the world, Ireland was kept incredibly
poor.
The population was almost entirely composed of peasants.
The large majority of ALL HOUSES were huts made of mud.
And the land those peasants lived on was owned almost entirely by absentee English landlords
who never visited Ireland, and extracted exorbitant amounts in rent.
Even the British government regarded these landlords with disdain, calling them, quote,
“the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of
a country.”
So most Irish people were on a treadmill of extreme poverty.
They were the most destitute people in all of Europe.
“In many districts,” one government report found, “their only food is the potato, their
only beverage water.
A bed or a blanket is a rare luxury.”
And that part about the potato is especially important.
Ireland has a lot of fertile soil, and a topography that is ideal for grazing cattle.
But when the British came in and colonized Ireland, they systematically took that land
and used it to produce beef for the domestic English market.
So the Irish were pushed off their land, and had to make do with the worst territory on
the island.
And so the economically poor Irish turned to the potato: a versatile crop that could
be grown in large numbers on bad soil.
But while the potato was ADAPTABLE, it was also really UNRELIABLE.
There had been widespread potato failures pretty much every other year in the nineteenth
century.
And in the 1840s, a new potato disease, originally from North America, arrived in Europe.
Huge potato crop failures sprung up in northern France, in Belgium, and in the Netherlands.
But none of those places were as dependent on the potato as a source of food as was Ireland.
So when the disease got to Ireland in the 1840s, the results were devastating.
In 1845, about a third of the Irish crop was destroyed; by 1846, seventy five percent of
it was gone.
Hunger spread rapidly, of a severity that had never before been known.
This period became known in Ireland as the Drochshaol: “the bad life.”
But as Amartya Sen observed, this wasn’t just about a pure lack of food.
In fact, during the entire period of the famine, Ireland was continuing to export food OUT
of the country.
Enough cows, sheep, pigs, and grain were being shipped out of Ireland to feed the Irish population
twice over.
But the British government refused to do anything about it.
Soon, the Irish began begging their British overlords for relief.
And early on, the Conservative Party government—then the representatives of the old British aristocracy—had
a fairly sympathetic response.
They bought some food from America and brought it to Ireland, distributing it to the poor.
But in 1846, a different party, the Whigs, came to power in Britain.
And the Whigs did not have the sort of aristocratic paternalism that the Conservatives had.
They were advocates of a philosophy called “LAISSEZ-FAIRE,” the idea that the free
market, left alone, would solve virtually any problem.
So the person they put in charge of famine relief in Ireland was a man named Charles
Trevelyan.
Trevelyan had been a colonial administrator in India, and he was a big believer in those
Malthusian ideas about population.
He didn’t really want to stop the starvation.
He thought it was, well, NECESSARY.
The famine, Trevelyan said, was, quote, “an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.”
He said it was “the judgment of God” that sent the famine “to teach the Irish a lesson.”
“The real evil,” he said, “is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral
evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people.”
So Trevelyan’s solution to the famine was to let it ride.
The laissez-faire Whigs decided to change nothing: they refused to stop the movement
of food to England, and limited the amount of food they offered to starving Irish people.
The food that WAS being imported into Ireland was largely used not to feed the Irish, but
to feed the cattle being slaughtered for British consumption.
Even when they did offer some relief to Irish peasants, they instituted moralistic tests,
requiring that recipients live as indentured servants in a workhouse to improve their work
ethic.
The British even required that food only go to people who owned almost no land—forcing
impoverished farmers to sell all the remaining land they had to their landlords, many of
whom lived in Britain.
And so the famine only got worse.
Diseases of hunger like typhus, dysentery, and cholera spread wildly, killing just as
many people as the lack of food.
Social structures broke down: ordinary people turned in mass to begging, crime, prostitution.
In western Ireland, some resorted to cannibalism.
The British, fearing a rebellion, sent army troops instead of food.
As news of the famine spread all over the world, shiploads of food finally began arriving.
Americans of all kinds generously sent money and food supplies over the Atlantic, only
to find they had to pay to have their cargo transferred to British ships and then unloaded
in Ireland.
Even several Native Americans, of the Choctaw people, donated to famine relief funds, just
a few years after they had experienced starvation themselves on the Trail of Tears.
It was a beautiful example of international solidarity.
But these donations weren’t enough to stop ruthless exploitation by British landlords.
Even when enough food was being imported, it wasn’t getting to Irish people.
Starvation and death continued.
Impoverished Irish, with barely enough to eat, were evicted from their homes.
One priest remembered the scene of a mass eviction:
“Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift
on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved
less consideration than the last and least of them.
The horrid scenes I then witnessed, I must remember all my life long.
The wailing of women—the screams, the terror, the consternation of children—the speechless
agony of honest industrious men—wrung tears of grief from all who saw them.”
By the time the famine began to end, in the early 1850s, about twenty percent of the Irish
population—two million human beings—had died of disease or hunger.
Another two million had left for brighter shores.
Today, Ireland’s population is still lower than it was in the 1840s.
But Ireland has never forgotten the famine, and the generosity that some showed to them.
During COVID, when the people of the Navajo nation were hit hard, Ireland repaid the kindness
shown to them during the famine by raising two million dollars for them.
And Ireland has never forgotten those who did not help them – the British government,
and all those who valued profits over humanity.
As the British historian A.J.P.
Taylor would later write: “The English governing class had the blood of two million Irish people
on their hands.
All Ireland was a Belsen.”