> In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish indolence)
Compare this to the 1876 response in which "relief work" camps had workers doing strenuous labor in order to receive a meager ration of far fewer calories than would have been expended in the work.
> ... this 'Temple wage' consisted of 450 grams (1 lb) of grain plus one anna for a man, and a slightly reduced amount for a woman or working child,[12] for a "long day of hard labour without shade or rest."[13] The rationale behind the reduced wage, which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time, was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency' ...
Now where have I heard that recently
They’re many legitimate things to criticize about Musk. No need to cook up BS stories.
We had so much money we couldn't even close our safe'
~ https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-abou...
Musk [ Errol - the father ] studied electromechanics at the University of Pretoria, worked as an electrical and mechanical engineering consultant, and developed properties, especially retail and office property development.
His lucrative engineering business took on "large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base." He also owned an auto parts store, at least half a share in an emerald mine, and even "one of the biggest houses in Pretoria"
In 1979, Musk and his wife Maye divorced. Maye's book recalls that at the time of the divorce, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.
One of Elon's grandfather's was a senior politician in the (white) S.A. Government, the other grandfather a staunch Hitler supporting nazi who left Canada for SA for better acceptance.
Errol said his children grew up watching him sell emeralds all over the world, after he had them cut in Johannesburg. However, he always stuck to the rules of the trade: contact the potential buyer, meet in a neutral public place ("for obvious reasons"), and be subtle about exchanging money for gems.
2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were:
a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis.
b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine.
c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_.
"Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion."
On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters.
Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.
These correlations are hard to parse apart. There wasn't any famine in the USSR in the early 1950s either, but that does not mean that Stalin, compared to the 1930s, suddenly became a humanist leader interested in prosperity of all subjugated people.
And this continues even today. Colonialism is alive and well, and rapaciously exploits the global south every day. Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it, every government that saddles newly-freed nations with unpayable debt is part of it, every environmental regulation that shoves polluting industry or waste disposal there, where their own voters don't have to look at it, is part of it. And yeah, paying office buildings full of workers barely making starvation wages to remove kiddie porn from Facebook is also part of it. We just traded guns for money, and sure, being exploited to near-death is better if you're getting paid than if you simply earn the right to not be shot, but that's a fucking low bar there.
Let's suppose this extraction had an appreciable impact on the development of Britain: Could you explain why the British are not as wealthy as the Germans or the Swedes, being that the British possessed colonies, and the Germans and Swedes did not? This pattern holds for almost all North European countries, so take care that your explanation does not fixate on the two I have chosen.
No they aren't. The case for colonialism is that it improves the country so colonized and benefits the people therein by providing them with wealth and the trappings of civilization. For the most part, actual colonies failed in this ideal by doing more to exploit the people being colonized than to help them. But a company providing jobs to those overseas, even at a shit wage, is definitely providing benefit to those people by giving them a better opportunity than they would otherwise have.
The lesson of the "white man's burden" should be that you, the white man, do not know better than a people themselves what is good for them. Take that lesson.
This is not the truism as implied and saying that is not "white man's burden." Us filling beaches in developing countries with ships slated to be scrapped by people who work with plasma cutters while barefoot is not charity of any sort. Us polluting lands we do not own with waste we cannot dispose of under the environmental laws we ourselves have created in our own country is not "providing" anything, it's exporting misery. We demand our own people "earn" a living and by the same logic, demand thus of nations who do not necessarily agree, but we hold them hostage to it nonetheless.
If you want to uplift developing nations, tear up the agreements that give Western corporations the rights to plunder them, shred the documents of the "debt" they supposedly owe other nations for their own, deserved and far too delayed freedom, and treat their leaders with the respect they deserve and let them determine the destinies of their own countries, FOR ONCE, including and dare I say especially if said destinies are not the preferred ones by global colonial capitalism.
Everyone deserves freedom. No one deserves the freedom to be exploited, and it's long passed time we all started noting the difference. Freedom to be under the boot of capital is not freedom.
Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India? These shipbreaking yards aren't owned by British interests. Their conditions are reflective of a broader attitude of neglect across the entire subcontinent. "So cut off the supply of ships," you say; the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.
Because we reap the rewards of it?
> "So cut off the supply of ships," you say
Yes, I do.
> the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.
Imperialism is not as simple as "when you make people elsewhere do a thing." And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE." There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag. They're people for Christ-sakes, just like you, trying to earn a living, and they can't afford to quit that job, nor can they afford a pair of boots to do it more safely, and no established organization is in their country making sure they do. Just like we did before we had things like OSHA and child labor laws made cheap business bastards do the right thing here, they deserve the same.
And while we can't make them form an OSHA, what we can do is tell our own corporations they are not permitted to dump ships on foreign soil where people working incredibly unsafely for slave wages will take them apart. That, we very much can and should do.
I have spoken with a Bangladeshi woman who made this exact argument. Granted, her father owned (what she swore wasn't) a sweatshop, so she wasn't impartial. This is also something you see a lot in Brazil. The westerners want to protect the Amazon rainforest, and the locals want to develop it. It's very common for Brazilians to resent this attitude, because westerners are effectively trying to have input on Brazil's economic development, leveraging their status as purchasers of Brazilian exports.
> There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag.
I've watched probably upwards of thirty hours of footage of factories on the Indian subcontinent and have also observed a similar work culture in Latin America. There absolutely is a cultural problem in both regions not taking occupational health and safety seriously, and it's not just a management issue (though this certainly plays a role, and I'd say is probably a factor if we consider the shipbreaking example). If you've ever worked in construction or manufacturing, it isn't rare at all to find employees who will mock each other for wearing PPE or abiding by safety protocols. This has thankfully been changing as the boomers have aged out, but even among young guys it's not particularly rare, and this is in the west. There was never a widespread adoption of workplace safety in the countries we are talking about. There is often a feeling among both management and employees that it isn't affordable, as well as ignorance on the part of the employees who simply view many of these workplace hazards as inevitable. This sounds absurd to you and I because we know that they are not inevitable and that most can be avoided simply by wearing PPE, but that's because we attended shop class and had various government PSAs reminding us of our rights to refuse unsafe work.
Think of something like our approach to trash: Both India and Latin America have significant problems with public littering. Some will protest that this occurs as a result of poverty, because no one can afford to ship their trash out of the city - but this problem was also common in America up until very recently. It took the implementation of fines and a series of public service announcements to change people's behavior.
Surely there are proofs, then? And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks or "it is known" pseudo-common sense.
Saying that we need to consider opinions on the same level as actual observations because “political” is fundamentally wrong.
What is political, and must be, is how we act on those findings, the answer to the question “considering those facts, what do we do?” There are many possibilities that are worth discussion, from doing away with welfare entirely to UBI. But this must be based on facts, not ideology. Think tank opinion pieces belong here, in the political discussion.
If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?
If your point is that no academic study can be trusted because academics are raging socialists, then I don’t know what to tell you. We clearly do not live in the same reality.
In the UK benefits are reduced as earnings rise, you then start paying taxes at an income (as an employee) of just over £1,000 a month (the employee NI threshold is £241/week). You lose 55% from the benefits reduction, then lose with taxes, then you lose various concessions such as lower rates of/exemption from the tax paid to your local government and help with utility bills, you may have to pay travel costs - so for some people working leaves them barely, if at all, any better off.
Would you work under those circumstances?
> Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline.
So what do you do when people fail to meet that deadline? Let them starve?
So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?
It's been proven with children of rich families who become dependent.
It's been proven with poor communities who become dependent.
Most people don't do anything productive if they don't have to, and as this goes on they lose the capacity to do anything productive.
I have to disagree that you won't become dependent on assistance given too freely. Obviously these crises leaned way, way too far in the other direction to avoid it, however.
Scattered points - but during the famine to earn 'wage' of insufficient grain ration, you had to work. This happened in work houses and camps, not necessarily in their homes or home areas. Workhouses existed in most towns where labourers lived, leaving their homes and families or after being evicted. Families were split up, Men, Women and Children did not live together. The workhouses and camps had terrible conditions, and the work was hard enough to have injuries and deaths even ignoring the illnesses that spread and grew worse from conditions. The work was often pointless - famine roads for example, roads to nowhere, so the work effort did nothing to improve the situation.
Those that had been evicted for failing to pay their rent, as they couldn't afford food or had not potato crops to sell, were considered convicts. As they were paid for their labour in food and sometimes lodging, they could not work their way out of situation or pay for healthcare when they got sick or injured. Many immigrated as things worsened year-on-year, on famine ships, but were refused and rejected from docking in multiple countries due to fear of the infectious illnesses they carried and burden they would inflict - and those stuck on ships became more unwell.
There was enough food, in fact a surplus in Ireland - but the "excess" was exported and cheaper questionable alternatives were imported for the soup kitchens and workhouses. Potatoes were such a single point of failure not by coincidence - many lived as tenants on landlords land, on tiny holdings but were expected to produce their own food. Potatoes were the only crop able to do this, or rather the holdings had sized down because Potatoes allowed it.
To me, that all screams of a systems failure and would not have been fixed with simply larger rations. Even ignoring the morality part to how the system was formed, how Ireland was ruled and Landlord system worked - the Potato Famine exposed the problems and limitations of the system with urgent crisis. The system did not adapt, did not act proactively or even react, and did not seem to learn in time to respond to a growing crisis.
One of the learnings surely was how terrible the concept is of worrying about people becoming too dependent on assistance in a crisis - debating the morale hazard and long-term dependency concerns runs the risk for short term death, disease and collapse.
It isn't said in Ireland that the famine was caused by the Potato, or by the meagre rations - It's said it was caused by the British, really the system in place rather than the British race but that doesn't simplify as well.
That is, of course, ridiculous. You get the site back up and stop losing $BIGNUM. Once you've stopped the bleeding, then you can go back and do things the right way.
"We're giving the assistance too freely! Ah, maybe a little more work would be good for them, not me of course, but them, they are the ones not working hard enough, who are dependent, me? no I work hard for my money, that's why I get to decide who lives or dies because they are not working hard enough!"
The far bigger problem is creating entitled masters, not entitled slaves.
The question then is do you agree (certain) people are wild animals.
If so are you too not a wild animal and if not, what makes you special?
It has made many countries refuse to create robust healthcare/education/military (etc.) systems with local resources and instead depend on foreign resources that can be zapped away anytime and are often used to control local leaders to do the donor’s bidding.
Many locals in aid-dependent countries (including mine) say the same thing, yet it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid.
All the aid to Haiti, Afghanistan, and many other countries…their only achievement is now needing even more aid.
Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term..
These investments can be provided by foreigners, but it’s ultimately the locals that need to rise up to the occasion and use it well. Unfortunately, Haiti is rooted in endemic corruption, stemming in part from aid dependency.
There’s no point of giving aid to Haiti while maintaining the status quo of the country being a little more than a raw material supplier to richer countries.
My exact complaint is that many countries give aid to feel good…and also for the recipient to do the donor’s bidding instead of what’s right for their countrymen.
Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If Haitian leaders remain more accountable to foreign donors than their local population, there’s no incentive to improve.
It’s not the responsibility of foreigners to feed other countries’ populations. Those countries have governments made up of adults (often voted in by the masses) who can take decisions for themselves…it’s their fault if their citizens are left to starve, not foreigners.
> Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?
It’s not intentional, but that’s what inadvertently happens. There’s little incentive to find unique domestic solutions to long-running issues when foreign saviors are willing to cover for the Haitian government repeatedly.
At some point, we should admit that it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals.
The above reasoning is what caused the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on wars and so-called nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, all to no avail.
It helped neither the locals nor the U.S., where these wars have contributed to political turbulence with dire consequences.
"do-good"? No, you are confusing legitimate aid with "the first one's free". The fake aid is often designed to create dependency and send large part of the money back to the donors.
So foreign aid may make governments less accountable to their people. But colonial governments don't start off being accountable to their people. The "aid" that the British ruling class said would create dependence can only be understood in the context of the intense extractive practices that were already in place.
> Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term.
... but because Ireland was still exporting food to Britain, "aid" in the form of keeping Irish food to feed Irish people would clearly still have supported local agriculture. Not evicting farmers would have supported local agriculture. This is structurally different from shipping American grain to Afghanistan.
I don’t think it’s fair to apply the modern concept of aid to previous eras of colonialism, wars, and frequent famines. It was a different ballgame I feel I wouldn’t be qualified to comment on except I experienced it first-hand.
They deliberately never accepted help from outside for that exact reason. It worked for them.
The above is from a recent speech by Singapore's foreign minister; https://www.mfa.gov.sg/Newsroom/Press-Statements-Transcripts.... I think it's a reason why a handful of Westerners detest Singapore: that it developed without being dependent on them. "How dare they?!"
A fitting example is that Europe is currently learning a lesson about the implications of depending on an external partner (the U.S.) for defense. It means being bullied at will by that country and having no say.
A bit of dependence that would need reducing later is a very small price to pay to avoid a million starved.
Just let the people eat dudes.
Also Russell's party during the famine was the Whigs. O'Toole gets that wrong, referring to them as "The Liberals."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...
6 Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.
7 For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you;
8 Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you:
9 Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.
10 For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
11 For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.
12 Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.
13 But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing.
14 And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed.
15 Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.
- 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15
I never claimed that it said that.
> Also the KJV version is a pretty inaccurate translation
It's the version I am familiar with and thus the version that I used.
Of course any form of intelligence, university educated or former bourgeoisie suffered way more, got menial or at least underpaid jobs that paid barely for survival.
Both my parents had good university degrees in engineering (back when less than 5% of their peers managed to get to uni, economics and mechanical engineering/welding), and were paid maybe half of what some trench diggers or field workers got and barely scrapped to make ends meet.
He is also a hero solely based on the defamation case he lost raised by Ruth Dudley Edwards, where he (correctly) posited that Ruth had 'grovelled to and hypocritically ingratiated herself with the English establishment to further her writing career'.
Uh, this is the Bengal famine the parent comment refers to, right? Ireland has never had 58M people in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
The famine of 1876-8 in addition to being worse from the percent-causalities view, and a lifetime earlier (65 years), was also not centered in Bengal but in other regions of India generally further south and west. Different in time, place and severity, and different in the policy response in part b/c the 1943 famine was during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%931...
There’s another word for this, not a famine…
> It lead to the Revolutions of 1848.
Too bad politicians today don't read the history books they want to burn, they might save their own skins.
Fact: in 1847, nearly 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to British ports while hundreds of thousands of Irish people died of starvation and related diseases. There was PLENTY of food in Ireland.
FACT: The government refused to intervene in the market to prevent food exports, even as the Irish population faced severe food shortages. Why?
While crop failures were happening across Europe, the impact in Ireland was particularly devastating because of the population's heavy reliance on potatoes. The suggestion that food was only unaffordable for the poor overlooks the fact that the potato blight left many people without any access to their primary food source. WHY was it the only source of food in an abundant growing environment??
Fact: Wages paid on “work programs” for those (un)lucky enough to get on them were too low to purchase food at inflated "famine" prices, leading to widespread starvation.
The export of food from Ireland during this period was a significant factor in the suffering of the Irish people, and it is important to acknowledge the role of British economic policies and the prioritization of profits over humanitarian needs which seems to be a struggle for you.
You seem to contradict yourself as well, you say plenty of food, and then it was because of the reliance on potatoes, and then it was the only food source?
Maybe I just dislike comments that insist on saying FACT multiple times.
Workers got either in priority to farmers and further others. Except politicians and connected people got theirs first beyond workers. And some were able to buy it ahead of the queue.
The magical development in the West was driven by really heavy handed subsidies industrial development on already richer area, which USSR just could not afford, and especially not after funding the high military spending. That notwithstanding some completely broken experiments done in large scale like attempts to farm the steppes in the middle of nowhere, a lot of which was funded by export from the few basket countries which would have otherwise had enough food. And after a relatively short while, the industrialization effort stalled, a variety of farming related problems appeared due to both mismanagement, bad weather and plagues, countries involved got indebted on bad terms...
So yeah, it was "free".
The scarcity that made food and housing not free in practice is why monetization (capitalism) ended up being better, which I assume was MikePlacid's point.
Capitalism has problems for sure, but it eliminates scarcity more efficiently than any other system we have tried so far.
Capitalism may share the abundance unevenly, but it still creates it in the first place, which is key.
This famine happened from the concentration of power, not because food costs money. Democratic land reform solves it, keeping the monetary impetus in play.
The Holodomor was a very similar genocide where farms were collectivized. That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
We must judge harshly, but on the proper aspect.
The problem was not exactly that, there wasn't food export when there was famine. Communists are not that stupid. All they wanted was to overcome the corporate greed of the peasantry, who often sold food to workers at 2, 3, or 5 times the price, so they fought price gouging on food, determining fair prices, that would allow all the country to be well-fed.
But for some unknown reason in response to that beautiful and righteous policy the peasantry reduced food production, which caused the famine.
So to be clear: Communists exported food, stolen from the people who grew it, which is very well known, here's one citation from Wikipedia:
> In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
Further it wasn't "stupidity" of Communists but rather a deliberate genocide of those considered inferior. They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets. It is one of the more horrific acts of brutality in the 20th century, all in service of authoritarianism.
That is blatant manipulation. Most of those grain de facto didn't left the country and were used to fight famine. From 1930 there was massive grain import. Moreover, import was considered by Stalin from 1928, but at that time all the statistics showed, that food situation will be fully fixed by fair share from upper parts of peasantry.
>deliberate genocide of those considered inferior
This is literally a conspiracy theory on the level of the Jews starting World War II to exterminate the Europeans.
>They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets.
Yeas, and they did that exactly to give that grain to those children.
The fact is, communists with all honesty tried to achieve a fair distribution of necessities to the poorest. But as always leftist's "fair" implies market incentive distortion and as a result hindered production.
The cause of the famine is not the evil communists who took grain from hungry peasants, communists simply tried to take excess food from the rich and give it to the poor. The cause of the famine is the 7-fold drop in food production. And when you have that drop - there inevitable will be mass famine.
For anyone else who doesn’t know, Ireland was exporting grain and meat during the famine at the orders of the British. They explicitly let the Irish die if someone else could order the food because Free Trade was perfect and if it wiped out a bunch of undesirables to boot, even better[1]
As you had groups with a wildly different wealth as the Ottaman Sultan and the Choctaws on the Trail of Tears scrounging for anything to spare to feed the starving Irish, their British overlords were shipping away food to anyone who could pay them a penny more.
If it wasn’t an engineered genocide then it’s close as you can get to one imo
[1] https://ireland-calling.com/irish-famine-ireland-exported-fo...
I think that’s a misconception-yes, there were a significant number of absentee landowners from England, but they were never the majority - the majority of wealthy Irish landowners lived in Ireland. Only around a third of large Irish landowners lived outside of Ireland.
One issue was that the land-owning upper classes were near exclusively Protestant, while the vast majority of the poor were Catholics-which is not to say no Protestants died in the famine, many did-but, while at the time Ireland was 80% Catholic 20% Protestant, famine deaths were 90% Catholic only 10% Protestant-so a Catholic was 2.25 times more likely to perish in the famine than a Protestant. Even though by the time of the famine, most of the formal legal discrimination against Catholics had been repealed, the consequences of it were still very evident.
Although there were many poor Protestants, the average poor Protestant was still better off (and hence more likely to survive) than the average poor Catholic, having benefited from generations of anti-Catholic/pro-Protestant discrimination.
Protestants also benefited from the greater wealth of Protestant charities - even though many Protestant charities were willing to help Catholics too, most Catholics were fearful to accept their help, viewing it as an inducement to conversion
Consider for example, Edmund Burke (the famous conservative philosopher) - he was born in Ireland to a Roman Catholic mother and a Church of Ireland father; his parents raised him Anglican and his sister Catholic - this was not an uncommon compromise for middle class Irish families of the time, discriminatory laws limiting career and education opportunities for Catholics largely didn’t apply to women who were excluded from careers and higher education irrespective of their faith. It is unclear whether or not his father, a lawyer (at a time when Catholics weren’t allowed to practice law) had converted from Catholicism, or if one of his ancestors had - but given Burke’s paternal line came from an old Hiberno-Norman family, descendants of the 12th century English invaders who over the following centuries assimilated to a Gaelic identity, it is obvious that one of his patrilineal ancestors must have switched from Catholicism to Protestantism at some point.
Where are you getting japan from?
Yes, the war time administration fucked up, but to say "its always the British" is reductionist and also sidelines some of the most brutal civilian subjugations of WWII.
Besides we still call these events "famines"? Interesting. I thought genocide would be the word, isn't it?
The Irish people mentioned appear to actually be part of the plantation class of British people who arrived into Ulster. I don't think the framing should be taken sincerely.
Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.
A glimps can be had, when looking at countries going bankrupt who can not import these basics: Sri-Lanka https://www.wfp.org/news/food-crisis-sri-lanka-likely-worsen... or Pakistan.
Let's not forget Norman Borlaug
There were other crops in Ireland at the time that were exported under armed guard. A lot of the policy was driven by the fact that some British politicians saw the famine as a natural way to ‘thin the herd’ of the Irish populous.
Of course, Houses of Parliament records show that there were British politicians that were morally aghast at this, but unfortunately they couldn’t have enough of an impact.
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.
I'd be more shocked to find out that Britain in the 19th century made things better in a region with famine.
If that recollection is correct, then while the english might not have lit the metaphorical fire, they definitely gathered the kindling.
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.
> 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.”
A snippet from the snippet you apparently neglected to read.
Yes, that's generally how power works.
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.
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.
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).
Where does this come from?
The article we are discussing mentions various bits of helping, as does the wikipedia page.
It looks like a complex mix of various entities doing different things they think would help, some effective, some not.
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.
The Irish were not "white" back then
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.
> 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.
This is a fascinating point:
> In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”