[EGreg]

It’s one thing to have a bad crop. It’s another to have your government enforce some heartless economic system at the expense of people’s lives, and utterly fail at helping them by accepting foreign aid from other countries.

Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much later famines in the Bengal regions[4] were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat.

Irish Potato Famine was exacerbated a lot by the system of landlords and private property protections.

Bengal Famine was largely exacerbated by Churchill’s policies that heavily favored the British at the expense of people on the Indian subcontinent. And of course the entire British Raj came about through state capitalism (the British East India Company getting the empire’s support and appointing governors).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

[JumpCrisscross]

> the much later famines in the Bengal regions...entire British Raj came about through state capitalism

There is an interesting thread of history in the earlier 1770 famine in Bengal.

The EIC over-taxed during the famine, leading to "a large proportion of the dead [being] spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food" [1]. Dead spinners produce no textiles, which caused the Company losses. That crashed the stock and--together with a short squeeze in EIC stock and ensuing pan-European banking panic--prompted Britain's first modern credit crisis [2]. That, in turn, required a bailout from the Bank of England and, among other assistance, the Tea Act in 1773 [3], which, together with images of the EIC's ruthlessness in Bengal, caused the Boston Tea Party [4] which kicked off the American Revolution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_credit_crisis_of_1772–...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

[EGreg]

Thanks for sharing this! I didn’t realizs the connections… just like I didn’t realize that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis because Cuba wanted to defend itself against the US “special military operations”, and made an alliance with USSR. Not at all dissimilar to what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. Anyway, I like making these connections across disciplines — at the time the people reacted exactly to these things.

DOES ANYONE KNOW OF A BOOK THAT COVERS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES IN THIS WAY?

The vast majority of ways science is taught, we just learn the shrinkwrapped version. I want to know how they finally figured out the mind was in the brain vs heart, how they got past spontaneous generation, humors, phlogiston, who was a proponent of luminiferous ether after the michelson moey experiment, and more importantly… how did they discover molecules and the atom, what did they know before they had electron microscopes… how did they use the older, worse theories and how did they eventually discover these new concepts like tectonic plates etc

did Popov and Marconi and Tesla know each other… in short how did science develop? Any books like that?

[Eisenstein]

I think 'Cosmos' the TV series (old and new ones) is the best 'popular' version of such a history.

The thing that I think you are overlooking though is that Tesla and Marconi and Popov were not required to invent radio and modern electronics. There is a reason why a lot of groundbreaking inventions get invented by different people in different places at around the same time. Look into 'multiple discovery theory'[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

[d3vmax]

This is a very interesting chain of events. All European exploitation was cruel and history was written by victors. With China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge. Right now, history is heavily tilted towards the western story.

[JumpCrisscross]

> with China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge

None of this was hidden. American political, British financial and Indian geopolitical history are just rarely taught together.

India and China have no paucity of cruel and exploitative histories. Both contain periods of empire building, ethnic cleansing and wrenching inequality. A better takeaway is recognizing the common impulses our economic and political systems cause in us and how they may be foreseen and mitigated.

For example, the history I just recounted followed the Seven Years' War, in which the British (among others) beat the French and Spanish (among others) [1]. (This also circles back to Paris backing the American revolution.) At the time, the Spanish dollar was the world's reserve currency and Britain a rising power. Guess how they framed their rise and predecessors' fall?

(Unnecessary aside: and they were right. The British I mean. My Indian descent obliges familiarity with British atrocities on the subcontinent and abroad. But at least we, with a competent government led largely by those descended from the indigenous at the time when the British came, can name them. She scale and continuity of the Spanish crown’s atrocities and exterminations show no such delineation nor legacy. And on the next turn, my American citizenship obliges familiarity with our illegal invasions and proliferation of war crimes. But at least we label them as much. In the time of the British Raj and America in the Philippines, that was business as usual.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War

[EGreg]

From what I understand, the Spanish conquistadores were far more brutal than the British, who were in turn more brutal than the French, who actually befriended the natives and gave them horses.

Having said that, most people die from “mundane” things like influenza and famines, and not necessarily cruelty. Those are the things we all have to try to prevent the most.

[JumpCrisscross]

There isn't a moral arc to history, but perhaps a moral regression. We tend towards goodness, simply because we each know more throughout time.

[bregma]

It was more mercantilism than capitalism. The same ism that resulted in the American Revolution in which one set of mercantilists overthrew another set. Capitalism was arising at the time but was not yet ascendant.

[EGreg]

Well, I am talking about the enforcement of private property of the landowning class, landlords and middlemen extracting rents for them — quintessential parts of Capitalism. And the Whigs explicitly going for laissez faire and attributing the famine to laziness — are not unlike the Republicans today, though today we have far more safety nets for everybody!

[roschdal]

> the Irish Potato Famine and the much later famines in the Bengal regions were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat.

Interesting, tell me more about how the economic system in Britain caused the famine in Ireland.

[kubb]

Ireland got independence in 1921. The great famine was 1845−1849.

The worst kind of ignorant is the smug one.

[rocqua]

Ireland was a colony of Britain. The economic system of Britain was much more concerned with extracting value from its colony than it was in caring about the people in its colony.

[zo1]

Sure but how did it benefit them to let their "crop" die of famine? Seems like a stupid thing to do, even if you don't care about the well being of your "stock".

[defrost]

Potatoes were not the crop of the rich British landlords, they cared little for the Catholics who they regarded as breeding out of control.

During the years prior to the famine the landlords pushed more and more people from the best lands for failure to pay rent, grew more grain, raised more sheep, shipped these back home to England and watched the Irish starve more and more as their population tripled(? IIRC - it grew by a lot).

[rsynnott]

Few things about the former British administration of Ireland (or indeed of Scotland, Wales, or Northern England; the UK has never gotten the hang of regions even in modern times - before it left the EU, 7 of the 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe were in the UK) would lead one to assume competence.

[episode0x01]

I genuinely can't tell if you are being serious or not. Are you not familiar with Britain's and Ireland's "relationship"?

[defrost]

You've got a wealth of Irish history to catch up on it seems.

https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=516

[roschdal]

Honestly, I thought the Irish potato famine was caused by a potato plague. That's all...

[defrost]

Fair enough if you knew nothing else.

In reality it was the last straw after decades of English landowners pushing a rapidly increasing local population further and further into the weeds and denying access to traditional lands and their resources.

"The Irish Question" had been debated at length and from afar in the British houses of Parliment for years prior, and there were a number of small famines before the big crop failures that saw millions displaced.

It's another in a common pattern of invaders colonising a country resulting in dire outcomes for those already there.

[shever73]

During the famine, Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid of the Ottoman Empire offered £10,000 to the Irish people to help ease the suffering. Queen Victoria intervened and requested that he reduce the donation to £1,000 since she had only allocated £2,000 herself.

[StanislavPetrov]

The vast majority of people who are woefully wrong about history (and current events) are being completely earnest about their beliefs.

[ranko]

W B Yeats, born in Dublin in 1865, put it like this:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

[EdwardDiego]

And to add the complex icing to the complicated cake, Yeats was Anglo-Irish, from a family that had come over as part of William of Orange's forces during the 17th century Williamite vs. Jacobite war.

(Technicality trivia - he was born in Sandymount, which wasn't part of Dublin until the 1930s)

[EGreg]

Thus my comment. I am glad it can help people realize that people’s governments, economic systems and the way people organize through a crisis can play a huge role — to mitigate a major crop failure or to massively exacerbate problems.

[walrus01]

English-based land owners of massive agricultural holdings in Ireland were literally exporting huge quantities of food from Ireland at the same time that people were starving.

[dingaling]

There actually was a net shift from export to import. The problem was that the country lacked the infrastructure to prepare wheat and oats for human consumption. Even fish were traditionally used as fertiliser rather than as food.

1844 408,000 tonnes exported; 23,000 tonnes imported

1847 137,000 tonnes exported; 893,000 tonnes imported

https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-202289...

[rocqua]

Interesting, I had heard that Ireland was still exporting potatoes during the famine. The article you sent paints a more nuanced picture.

Also, for other readers, the trade balance didn't just switch because of dropping exports, imports also rose significantly.

[talideon]

Not exporting potatoes, but just about everything else. Potatoes were just about the only crop Irish peasants produced that their landlords weren't interested in, and the only source of meat was pigs as pork and bacon weren't particularly popular in 19th century Britain, they can effectively live on anything, are good foragers, and do less damage than goats when foraging.

Ireland was the UK's breadbasket and even to this day, the UK has a high dependency on Ireland as a source of food. That didn't stop during the Great Famine: Ireland was still producing immense amounts of food, but due to the Corn Laws and other trade restrictions placed on Ireland by the UK, there were very few mills to turn grain produced in Ireland or imported into something usable.

[EGreg]

Sure. The entire system that exacerbated the problem was of a thoroughly capitalist character. It revolved around the landlord class vs the poor tenants / sharecroppers, as well as exporting food at a time of famine (as did Bengal famine).

You’d do well to start in the wikipedia article that I linked. Some quotes:

Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism[15][16] and single-crop dependence.[17][18] Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, in part because they believed the famine was due to lacking moral character,[19][20] and only resumed later. The refusal of London to bar export of food from Ireland during the famine was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land.

…

Landlords and tenants Edit During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.[36]

Catholics, the majority of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these absentee landlords lived in England. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export[15]—was mostly sent to England.[16]

…

The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie, or mitigating tradition of paternalism as existed in Britain, as the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that supplanted the Gaelic aristocracy in the 17th century was of a different religion and newer. In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that "confiscation is their common title".[39][40] According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever.[39] The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.[39][a]

The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[36] They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[36] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.[41][42]

As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose.

…

Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[38]

Tenants and subdivisions Edit See also: Irish farm subdivision

A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine (National Library of Ireland) The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that when a tenant died, his land should be divided equally between his sons. Population growth, from about 2 million by 1700, to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[43]