| As an Irish person when I saw the article title, I was immediately sceptical. I personally believe most articles about the famine shy away from the horror of it, and also from a frank discussion. Going to give some subjective opinion here: people generally downplay the role of the British government and ruling class in it. Why? One personal theory - growing up in the 80s in Ireland there was a lot of violence in the north. (Most) Irish people who were educated or middle class were worried about basically their kids joining the IRA, and so kind of downplayed the historical beef with the British.
That's come through in the culture. There's also kind of a fight over the historical narrative with the British, maybe including the history establishment, who yes care a lot about historical accuracy, but, also, very subjectively, see the world through a different lens, and often come up through British institutions that view the British empire positively. It's often easier to say the famine was the blight, rather than political. (They do teach the political angle in schools in Ireland; but I think it's fair to say it's contested or downplayed in the popular understanding, especially in Britain.) However that article is written by a famous Irish journalist and doesn't shy away from going beyond that. Perhaps a note of caution - even by Irish standards he'd be left leaning, so would be very politically left by American standards; he's maybe prone to emphasize the angle that the root cause was lassiez-faire economic and political policies. (I'm not saying it wasn't.) I personally would emphasize more the fact that the government did not care much about the Irish people specifically. The Irish were looked down on as a people; and also viewed as troublesome in the empire. Some government folks did sympathize, of course, and did try to help. But I personally do not think the famine would have happened in England, no matter how lassiez-faire the economic policies of the government. A major dimension must be a lack of care for the Irish people, over whom they were governing; and there are instances of people in power being glad to see the Irish being brought low: "Public works projects achieved little, while Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the relief effort, limited government aid on the basis of laissez-faire principles and an evangelical belief that “the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”."
per the UK parliament website! It's not an easy thing to come to terms with even today. I recently recorded a video talking about how fast the build out of rail infrastructure was, in the UK, as an analogy for how fast the AI infra build out could be; and I got a little quesy realizing that during the Irish potato famine the UK was spending double digit GDP percent on rail build out. Far sighted, yes, and powering the industrial revolution, but wow, doing that while mass exporting food from the starving country next door, yikes. |
The Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote a book in 1999, _Development as Freedom_ which argues, relatively convincingly, that famine's don't happen in functioning democracies among their own citizens. The book makes the observation that famines happened regularly in British colonial India, every few decades, but basically stopped in democratic, self-governing India. (1) And, as far back as the Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese many of the stories told about what good governance looked like involved beating famines- either because they were able to organize shipments of food from unaffected areas or because they stored up enough grain in the good times to survive the crop failures.
It is the general consensus among people who study this sort of thing that, as the United Nations OHCHR wrote in 2023, "Hunger and famine did not arise because there was not enough food to go around; they were caused by political failures, meaning that hunger and famine could only be addressed through political action." (2) Yes, a particular crop failure can be a natural disaster, but a famine happening requires a political failure on top of that (and the research does seem to indicate causation: the political failure is not caused by the crop failure but was pre-existing, and caused the crop failure to turn into a famine).
So, basically, yeah, the general consensus of people who study famines today and in the past is that the British government made choices that turned a crop failure into a famine. The same with the Great Famine of India, the Bengal Famine, the Soviets and the Holdomor, etc.
1: Generally, my understanding is that people who look at this think that Sen was basically correct. There might be a couple of occasions where a democracy failed to govern and suffered a famine, but, the way that democracies distribute power makes it far more unusual for them to fail so catastrophically that they can't deliver food to an area experiencing crop failure. This is one of the reasons that democracies are better than authoritarian governments!
2: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/03/conflict-and-violence-...