A crazy fact is that a higher percentage of Irish died in the Great Famine (well over 10% of the population) than in the Bengal famine in India in 1943 (about 3.5%).
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.”
Maybe a closer comparison would be famine of 1876-8, where some estimate go as high as 8.6M fatalities on a population of ~58M.
> 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' ...
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.
No one disputes that Errol Musk had money (including Elon himself), but, as the link illustrates, it was from an engineering business and not from apartheid mines as implied by the OP.
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.
Errol Musk had multiple lines of income, including NSRs from three emerald mines that made a return.
Dependence on assistantialism is a real phenomenon. Here in Colombia (and probably all over the developing world?) it has been well proven that permanent help does create complacency and dependency. Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline.
1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding
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_.
The narrative that colonizers shouldn't "assist" the victims of a famine when the colonizers were the ones driving down food production and exporting grain is so mind-bogglingly backwards. This is only a step away from an arsonist setting fire to your house and preventing the fire department from responding because that would only teach you to become dependent on the state bailing you out of every crisis.
Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.
"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.
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.
On the topic of the colonization of India, "Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India" is an illustrative book - especially if you want more context to draw conclusions about the scale of wealth taken from India.
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.
The argument wouldn't be that the famines occurred due to british mismanagement, but rather due to british management. A country produces a certain amount of food during times of plenty. If they are careful, they will stow away some of that excess food for times of hardship. If they are being "managed" by a foreign power for its own benefit, this excess will instead be shuttled away to generate income. During times of hardship, there will be no excess to feed on and people will starve. The foreign power, in turn, will be nowhere to be found. This is no accident or failure, but rather the colony being run as intended: for profit, not for the benefit of the people living there.
There was also a high level of extreme poverty in India for many decades after independence. Maybe not large scale famines, but people being constantly very badly malnourished.
It also coincides with the end of WWII and thus the end of the Japanese naval threat, which was a factor in the last Bengal famine.
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.
The British did plunder INCREDIBLE resource wealth from India, and various African countries, and the Americas prior to the revolutionary war, and the Carribean, and some South American countries too. And they weren't alone: Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and more, all colonizer nations, all held colonies, all of which generated revenue which was returned to/made in the home country. Like come on.
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.
There was obviously value extraction taking place in these areas. The question is if this extraction had meaningful impacts on the trajectory of the imperialists or that of their subjects. Decolonialists would have you believe that Britain would not have industrialized had it not been for materials they "stole" from India, Africa, and the Americas.
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.
> Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Textile manufacturing is an interesting example because some large companies do sign up to anti sweatshop rules. Back in the day Gap got pressured into doing that I believe. Here in UK, last I heard (may not be up to date) Marks and Spencer does that, and apparently so do Primark (cheap clothes store who many might assume use sweatshops), while large supermarket Tesco I've heard associated with using sweatshops and being unresponsive when people complained. I'd argue we the western consumer are responsible to a certain extent. We can do research and find out who's best to shop with and direct our spending accordingly, thus impacting the lives of people in those countries.
> Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India?
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.
> And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE."
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.
Is that because of the structure of the assistance?
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?
For either, if the papers don't stand up to peer review and meta-analysis then yes, we should ignore them. Don't often see papers from think tanks engaging in actual science though....
We should ignore fact-free white paper from left-leaning think tanks, as well. We should accept scientific studies with a clear protocol, regardless of the institution. That is the bare minimum and then, those studies can be refuted or not depending on several factors.
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.
You have to be willing to entertain evidence from biased sources when you’re considering politically charged questions. By all means, consult evidence from various ideologies, but don’t hold out for unbiased scholarship that will never exist.
“Does welfare make people less productive” is not a political question. We can measure welfare and we can measure many aspects of productivity and activity. We can make a quantitative answer to that question. Opinion and ideology is not evidence.
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.
What medieval gibberish is this? I have installed a ton of robots in my time- and they put a ton of people permanently and forever out of work. It just evaporates - and does not return.
So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?
This also ostensibly occurred in New York in the 1970s, but the key thing to understand is that there is a significant historiographical tradition which views the Irish famine as a negligent (or intentional) genocide on the part of the British.
The main problem seems to be setting the backup payment below the rate necessary to sustain life.
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.
It's a deep and complicated part of history, but I think calling out a single main problem really risks skipping over the depth and scale of the problems.
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.
Your web site is down. You're losing $BIGNUM every hour. Someone says, we can work around it if we do this hack in this bit of code. But someone else says, we shouldn't do that, it will add technical debt and make more work for us later on down the line. We need to take our time and do it right.
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.
The problem is it compares humans to wild animals. If you feed wild animals they'll see you as a food source and often expect you'll continue to feed them forever.
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?
That kind of justification is absolutely what gets people to experiment with working people to death who are dying of starvation.
"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!"
Because it’s true. Aid makes governments less accountable to their people and more accountable to donors.
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..
If you're mentioning Haiti, it's only fair to add that they were saddled with a crippling debt to France (later to the US - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt) from the very beginning of their existence, and many of their current problems can be traced back to that. It's important to see both sides, especially now that it's clear how corrosive this narrative is if you're looking at Musk's attitude toward USAID...
We’re likely in agreement. What Haiti needs is investment in domestic industries to be competitive in a capitalist world.
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.
I cannot imagine a way out of this, the way you put it. Not giving any aid today means condemning masses to death. Giving some aid today means feeding the masses and maintaining the corruption. The foreign donors cannot condition the aid, or they theoretically could but have zero leverage for actually following up, because see above - they could only stop it, which nobody wants. I'm aware that it's common to blame the foreign forces for any bad situation, but again, I see zero ways to change the status quo just by modulating the foreign aid. Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?
This is one of the aims behind Fair Trade. Its giving a fair price to local producers for products, which means you can help people without running into issues of perverse incentives, dependency, lack of self-determination. That's the theory at least... For items not easily produced in the west e:g tea, coffee, chocolate, bananas, we try wherever possible to buy Fair Trade.
> Not giving any aid today means condemning masses to death.
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.
"it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals." - I agree with that but, to me that isn't an argument against providing targeted, life-saving aid to those in a terrible situation, whilst try to be mindful that the locals should be listened to and often in charge of it, and that aid can have negative effects if done badly. To give an example, I'm sure no-one in a disaster zone worries about arrogance when they see a doctor arrive from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). But hopefully MSF once they've dealt with the initial problem, are trying to help locals train up in medical techniques that they themselves want and work in the local environment. From what I've seen, I believe they do just that.. probably not always perfectly.
I think maybe there's an important different ethical and practical situation with genuinely foreign aid (rich countries sending resources to poor countries which have their own government, systems, regulations etc) vs a colonizing power that's effectively already in control of the area in which they helped form the crisis. The British were exporting food from Ireland and India in both of those crises. British land speculators bought Irish land and raised the rents and evicted farmers -- i.e. people already engaged in producing food were forced to stop.
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.
True, I was referring to the modern context of aid, not colonial times with extractive economies.
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.
> it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid
"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.
There were other methods that could have prevented starvation: the British could have closed Irish ports for export, so that the food raised in Ireland stayed there to feed the Irish. Instead, the British continued exporting food from Ireland. They could also have forbidden the distillation of grain (a potential food source) into whiskey, but they didn't, although some distilleries shut down as depopulation led to lower demand.
Having now checked the wikipedia page, that doesn't seem like it would have made a particularly big difference. The imports dwarfed the exports, particularly during 1847 when they were 8x larger.
> On the international stage, if you have to put your hand out for assistance, it means you have no say. It is a big advantage for Singapore not to have to beg for aid. We have no need for assistance or loans that will subject us to external pressure. We are not dependent on any single external partner. And perhaps even more importantly, and you have just heard Minister Ng’s speech earlier, we do not depend on any external country to defend Singapore. We have the capability and the will to defend ourselves.
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.
The difference is that both Singapore and the EU did, or start doing, things by themselves. Just blaming the US for their misdeeds might feel good but does exactly nothing to help the bullied further.
Very much so. Tim Pat Coogan covers this in his book "The Famine Plot" (which is one of the major proponents that the great hunger was a genocide and has received a lot of criticism, but which covers the basic facts in good detail).
[edit: somebody elsewhere in this comment section has (apparently seriously) proposed Malthusianism as the root cause. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. With all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. You can't keep a bad idea down]
Except by your Secretary of State, who Schumer petitioned to get Coogan his visa for academic touring when it was strangely denied by the Dublin Embassy.
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'.
I'm aware that he has his detractors. I'm not a Coogan apologist! I'm just saying that the book covers the Malthusian angle well enough and it cites sources. The genocide angle is controversial to some but 90% of the book is straightforward fact.
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.
That's very different from saying you shouldn't help people in a famine. Jesus also said, "blessed are the poor" full stop in Matthew. Also the KJV version is a pretty inaccurate translation and I don't know why people quote it in 2025 when there are translations that are both more accurate and more comprehensible.
I think the point is there is a big difference between "He who does not work shall not eat" and "...anyone who was unwilling to work should not eat". Specifically the clause "unwilling to work".
As a socialist principle "who does not work" referred primarily to the bourgeoisie, i.e. who get money from capital gains, rents or inheritance as opposed to labor, although it did also mean that in early stages of socialism the communist principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their ability" is not feasible.
Nah not really, I grew up in communism/socialism and it was literally forbidden by laws to not have a work, that was ticket straight to jail.
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.
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.
The Irish famine is roughly comparable to other famines of the 19th century in terms of its mortality rate (i.e. Mysore in the 1870s). A true comparison is difficult since there were not accurate census figures in most famine prone regions but the rate is comparable (Ireland is on the high side but it was still comparable within the margin of error). What is unique about the Irish famine is that modern day Ireland’s population is still about 25% lower now than it was in the eve of the famine 180 years ago. I can’t think of any other place that depopulated like that.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
Mortality rate doesn’t paint a full picture of the effect on Ireland. Emigration had a huge effect on the depopulation too. (I don’t think you deliberately left this out or anything just wanted to provide additional context).
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.
A somewhat related side-note (might be interesting): William Dalrymple recently talked about - "How in India the Irish Transformed from Colonised to Colonisers" - https://nitter.net/DalrympleWill/status/1898036558898585768 - and not quite/always the benevolent/sympathetic ones.
Besides we still call these events "famines"? Interesting. I thought genocide would be the word, isn't it?
> "How in India the Irish Transformed from Colonised to Colonisers"
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.
Famines, blockades & sanctions on basic goods were the WMD of the colonial age. All the latecomer nations raced to get out from under this boot and become empires - and became the same sort of monster or worser.
Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.
Great man, on whose shoulders many dwarfs have postured, about having brought peace by self-posturing and self-producing. We talked ourselves into having changed and being better than our predecessors, while eating their meals. We got drunk with ourselves on their grapes.
You are correct, food was exported outside of Ireland during this time period. This time was called the Hungry 40's and crop failures were happening all over Europe. It lead to the Revolutions of 1848. Food was only available at prices that the poor could no longer afford.
Unfortunately the Revolutions of 1848 were violently suppressed. The forces of order were able to exploit the differences between the political reformers and the social reformers.
Nice myth. Food wasn't quite provided for free. You did not get quite even basic rations enough to survive even if you were able to get them, further, due to mass exodus from farming to city, buildings were built there, and you had to wait a really long time, sometimes forever, to get a living space by lot.
Similar with a car - it all operated under severe scarcity.
All countries involved, even East Germany, had these problems.
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...
I didn't vote but I guess the downvotes are because it calls the parent claim a "myth" and then goes on to agree with it.
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.
The problem is not monetization of basic needs, the problem is putting the controlling interest in the hands of a few who do not care about the lives of the many.
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.
>That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
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.
I'm not sure if you are mocking the absurdity of the false communist narrative or just repeating it uncritically.
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]
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.
>In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes
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.
Sounds like you are trying to explain away over a million deaths as if it was happening everywhere in Europe and not primarily the British fault.
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.
The way this comment is written reads suspiciously like ChatGPT. And the name of the user has bot in it...
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.
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
There was no real market competition within Ireland. All the farms were owned by an elite mostly British class living in England which was a direct hold over from Feudalism. Regular Irish could only pay rent to this group to farm themselves. Import/exports were controlled by the British shipping and enforced by the military when locals resisted, all in direct coordination with the small amount of landowners. Particularly difficult situation on an island. It was extractive colonialism without a strong equal rule of law or self representation. Calling it laissez faire was just a cover to benefit the British.
> All the farms were owned by an elite mostly British class living in England which was a direct hold over from Feudalism.
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
Some Irish Protestants were descendants of recent immigrants from Britain, others were descendants of Irish converts from Catholicism.
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.
There may have been individuals within the British citizenry who independently did the best moral actions they could in the circumstances, but there's documented evidence that the political body at large and their leadership at best did not care an iota for an any and all deaths in the Irish due to the consequences of their leadership, or at worst actively hoped and planned for the deaths to remove an inconvenient people.
I’m not sure being a tax haven for multinationals by giving them sweetheart deals when the intentional loopholes don’t suffice is really indicative of a robust economy.
As long as it serves the local population (and apparently it does), I don't see why it's a wrong thing to. Ireland is not just a paper-holding tax haven; it has huge factories and engineering offices of large and successful corporations, again, employing local folks. I don't see how it might make its economy frail.
Japan was in the process of burning it's way through Burma, which is before that time was a massive producer of rice. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-26937-2_...) South-east asia suddenly lost something like 5 million tonnes of rice production in the space of two years.
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.
I went to school in the UK. Unsurprisingly, I don't think the Irish or Bengal famines were mentioned. In fact the whole British imperial project was largely glossed over. But lots of coverge of the Romans, Vikings, Normans, the black death and the two World Wars.
The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Spanish also did horrible things during their colonial periods. Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.
> In fact the whole British imperial project was largely glossed over. But lots of coverge of the Romans, Vikings, Normans, the black death and the two World Wars.
I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought. So they choose to not teach it. This leads British institutions today to have a serious colonial hangover whether they know it or not. The operating paradigm is still an outdated one in many cases.
They teach students what they think made Britain great -- the Romans, the Norman invasion, the World Wars, Churchill etc. -- while actually glossing over what made them great: Empire. It really brings to mind a line from the Thor: Ragnarok movie - "Proud to have it; ashamed of how they got it". The British people today might not have an idea of their Empire but the effects still linger on in their former colonies.
> I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought.
I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.
Two world wars, and slavery is pretty much all we were taught, unless you specialised.
"modern" immigration was/is much more driven by our former membership of the EU than empire.
Empire is why our friends had Caribbean grandparents. WWII for polish grandparents, and Idi Amin why they also might have had indian parents born in Uganda.
But they were all pretty British to us. They sounded like us, dressed the same.
"modern" immigration when I was growing up was mostly Portuguese and Polish, later more baltics when that opened up to schengen.
But those later countries were also a product of another empire: USSR.
> I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.
Millenial here from the US. I was taught about the British Empire, extensively, in both high school and college. My high school teacher played "Rule, Britannia" (lyrics include "rule the waves") for us to hammer home the point.
Not a universal experience though: also a US Millennial, in middle school/highschool our history classes were pretty much only US history, and only touched world history as GP described. We did have a world history elective in highschool though, but it was an advanced placement class and not everyone could take it. No history classes during college.
Additionally my history classes all ended around the 60s-70s - roughly when the teachers were kids. Seemingly from their perspective "history" didn't include anything they experienced.
Neither. While colonialism didn't _create_ generational poverty, the systemic genocides of the British were new. Colonial policy of prioritizing exports directly led to the deaths of millions. That's a fact.
A similar comparison would be between Roman slavery and the chattel slavery of the Americas. They are both abhorrent practices (just like the genocides caused by Indian rulers in the pre-British period), but it pales in comparison to the scale and horror of antebellum slavery.
Well, if this is not mentioned at all during history classes, at least it prevents them from being taught that "British brought prosperity and development to all of its colonies, making the world better for everyone" and "they should be thankful that we went there and did all those things, how nice of us, and how rude of them not to thank us again and again!".
I think it comes from the general belief that poverty is bad and a simplistic view of cause and effect. "Before the Empire they were really poor, with high mortality, after the empire they were much wealthier with lower mortality".
It's just going to be the default view if one does not have further information.
I went to school in Scotland 65-78 and it was mentioned, studied extensively, as was British colonialism and the post war independence movement. Perhaps Scots education ran to a different agenda to the English one.
(the Scots diaspora as a result of Land clearances, and the Irish independence struggle and its links (and opposition) to Scots Protestantism and Irish migration to the mainland might have driven this. We have both Irish independence fights at football matches and orange order parades)
My experience in America is largely one of the following:
American person on social media (and, yes, I would claim HN is social media) claims "They never taught us this in school!!!" with many agreeing emphatically.
... and 90+% of the time I remember specifically being taught it. Most people don't remember much of their educations.
In the US there are large regional differences in what is taught, especially when it comes to history topics. So some of the difference might be that your state had a more comprehensive approach to history than the commenters' states.
But yes, most people have a really bad memory of what's taught in school (and that probably isn't entirely their fault, the system clearly doesn't lead to sticky knowledge).
It isn't just state differences either, because schools are mostly funded by property taxes, areas that serve a more expensive area of properties receives way more funding. While an area that serves all cheap property gets dog shit in funding. The area I grew up in was mostly farms but had one lake that was way overly priced compared to everywhere else, a new development of cookie cutter houses but they were 4-5 times the price of other property around. And the school there was excellent, and had I not ever moved I would of assumed that was the standard public education quality level. But I moved schools in highschool to another mostly rural school 2 hours away, but they didn't have the new development well-off lake community, and despite being in the same state, the poorer school was literally 3-4 years behind in education and had a third of the material supplies and teachers were paid significantly less and thus were mostly of far lower quality. So that my senior year in the poorer school was essentially having what I learned in 8th and 9ths grade repeated to me my senior year, but of course for the locals that was the first time many of them heard those things.
My ex who loved history had to learn about it all on her own because she just got civil war history over and over and over. She wasn't even in the proper South. Though I'd get punched for saying that anywhere anyone could here.
Agreed - I was shocked to discover NY State curriculum has nothing about Native Peoples. I mean, the five nations were influential on early colonial life.
The scots educational curriculum is sufficiently different to the English that I had significant difficulty at (an English) University, because of assumptions about what was learned.
Also, time changes things. I did school during a period where school history was in ferment and the teacher said at some points we were learning a new curriculum which rejected "great men of history" theory and focussed on mass movements. I suspect after Thatcher this was revised, it was almost overtly marxist. The textbooks on post colonialism were pretty clear.
I hasten to add I had no problem with this, and I read "the 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte" as revision for the history exam in the library, with much pleasure. This was because we'd done a lot on the revolutions across Europe in 1848. Strangely we did very little on Chartism. When I went to uni I found out this was a really active field of study, especially in the midlands because so many Chartist pamphlets are held by places like Leeds university, the working class towns. Maybe thats why Scots History ignored it: it was a south of the border story! If they'd done the emergence of the British Labour party I bet we'd have had a lot given the origins of Labour in Scotland, and the Red Clyde story. That was probably done in year 12 and I left school early to go work in a Marine Biology lab.
I probably remember this because I enjoyed it. A lot of history doesn't excite everyone, perhaps I was lucky. I am buggered if I can remember the Maths, which isn't very helpful given I work in CS. Like Arnold Rimmer in "Red Dwarf" I am acceptably meh at colouring in the crinkly bits in Geography but not much else.
British Empire has on the UK National Curriculum since 1988 and was taught in history classes before the introduction of the National Curriculum. This is conveniently forgotten by people looking to make a point. My impression is that a certain type of Brit likes to play this "I'm one of the good ones" role where they admonish their compatriots' ignorance as a strange virtue signal. It involves collecting damning factoids about the worst aspects of of empire (bengal, irish conflicts, slavery etc) with little interest in the subject as a whole.
I don't think this is the case here. The English and Scottish curricula (and, I imagine, those of Wales and NI) are different. Most aspects of British colonialism are (were?) simply not taught in England unless you specifically chose that subject late in high school.
Looking back, it's also kind of amazing to think that the Northern Ireland Conflict was largely glossed over in English schools while it was going on, but the news coverage was pretty one-sided also.
I'm probably younger than the other Belgian data point in this thread but when I went to high school in the late 2000's our colonial past, warts and all, was taught during history class. Down to the pictures of people with chopped off hands because they hadn't met quota.
I went to elementary school in Belgium from 1978-1982. I had the sense there was some national pride in having had a major African colony, but maybe Leopold II wasn't a benevolent ruler. Unlike Leopold I or Albert I, who were depicted quite heroically. I didn't learn quite how far from benevolent Leopold II really was until much later in life.
Belgian here. Now, it's been decades, but we did get a mention of our colonial past, with a cartoon of Leopold II as a snake constricting some African person. I don't think we got told what kind of atrocities we committed (and Belgian colonialism was really, really bad), but we do get told it was bad.
In Germany the colonial period is taught, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference and global maps. The German colonies are hardly mentioned, Germany lost them all 100 years ago, and I don't think many Germans could name the countries/regions even. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_Wars ("systematic extermination of native peoples") isn't taught.
I wasn't aware of this exact plan either, but to the defense of my history teacher / curriculum:
It was made very clear that millions of civilians died (even when not counting the concentration camps) due to the war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg)
Non-German in Germany. I get the impression that everyone knows that one holocaust very shamefully, but not any of the other ones. Or the one that's happening right now. (In fact, I could get deported for this comment if the police had nothing better to do. Oh well.)
And in New Zealand they also didn't teach us about the way our ancestors holocausted the Māori.
Holocausts happen with alarming regularly in history, and the side doing one usually ends up winning, except, you know, that one time. I wish I understood what factors make people so unable to reason about them or even acknowledge them. Business as usual bias? Ego defense? I think the German teaching that there was only one and there will never be another falls under denial.
The way you can't talk about Palestine in Germany feels like the way you can't talk about Hacker News moderation on Hacker News, except, you know, the life and death of about 6 million Muslims are at stake.
In the Netherlands the colonial period is mentioned, but referred to as 'the Golden Century', and atrocities committed aren't really mentioned. There has been public debate about this in recent years, so this may have changed, and the debate in general, in addition to eg museums and documentaries paying attention to it, will probably have contributed to slightly more widespread knowledge about it. It's how I learned a bit about it.
I recently read "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" and it talks in some detail about the atrocities carried out by the Dutch in the spice islands. It isn't something I had been aware of before.
I also wasnt teached about this in school when I was a kid 3 decades afo. My history knowledge came selftaught from nul-tot-nu comics, where colonialism, slavery and holocaust definitly where touched upon.
These so called `zwarte bladzijden` (black pages, doesnt translate nicely) are more common in education nowadays after lively debates the last decade(s).
Must be said the knowledge/interest of historical knowledge among my fellow Dutchies isn`t all that great.
Just to let you know, the past tense of teach is taught; so you would say "I wasn't taught this at school". Other than that, your English is great (better than some of my fellow English people lol). Well done.
You are right, and thanks. Typing on mobile with alternative keyboard without spelling correction is a challenge. I was fortunate enough to be on a part Dutch/English primary school. That helped a lot with getting a lot of assumptions corrected. For instance as a kid I assumed the English word for "monkey" is "ape", because the Dutch word is "aap".
Directness is definitly part of both national characters indeed.
I asked the toasters, they said this about it:
Yes, Russian literature tends to translate well into Dutch, and there are a few reasons for that:
1. Linguistic Similarities in Syntax and Tone – While Dutch and Russian are from different language families, both can handle long, complex sentences without losing clarity. Dutch, like Russian, allows for a mix of formal and informal tones within a single text, which helps maintain the nuance of Russian literature.
2. Cultural Compatibility – Dutch readers appreciate introspective, philosophical, and existential themes, which are common in Russian literature. Authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov resonate well with Dutch audiences because of their deep psychological exploration and social critique.
3. Strong Translation Tradition – The Netherlands has a long history of translating world literature with high quality. Dutch translators often work directly from Russian rather than relying on intermediary languages like English or French, preserving the original style and meaning.
4. Directness and Emotional Depth – Russian literature is known for its raw emotional depth and directness, qualities that align well with Dutch communication norms. This makes Russian novels feel more natural in Dutch than in some other languages that might soften or rephrase certain expressions.
Many Dutch readers have a strong appreciation for Russian classics, and some Dutch authors have even been influenced by them.
Empire is taught now, though the specific parts of it will depend on the school/teacher. Here's an example of the sort of teaching material that might be used: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zy4sg2p
This is a reminder why trying to be hip to sell a message is actually very often counterproductive. (See D.A.R.E.)
That Quentin Question video made me cringe from the beginning to the eventual end when I closed it for being insufferable.
Patronizing kids does not hold sway in the long term. They don't stay young. I think it's better to treat them more mature than they are, to speak to the people they become.
That's KS2 material, so 7-11 year olds. They don't cover the Holocaust until they're older. Here's an example of KS3 material about the Holocaust. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zt48dp3
I definitely learned about the Irish Potato Famine when I did GCSE history in the UK (England) in the early 90s. I learned a lot about British colonial history too in my GCSE.
I did history GCSE as well in the mid 90s, and from what I can recall it was only 20th century history. I'm also pretty sure that the curriculum was split into several modules and the school got to pick something like 3 out of N modules to focus on.
> Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.
When I went to secondary school from about 1997-2001 Indonesia in particular was covered fairly extensively. From what I recall it wasn't white-washed either: I remember one chapter describing how a young Indonesian woman was punished with hot chilli pasta (sambal) on her vagina. Pretty graphic stuff to teach a 14-year old.
Experiences seem to differ though, because I've heard other people describe that it's barely covered and/or white-washed. Maybe it depends on the school? I don't know. Also the schooling system completely changed since then.
I don't think the Spanish address it at all. I lived there for a while and I remember visting a lot of glorious cathedrals and castles. Most of them were funded with gold looted from the Americas, but there was never any mention of it. And neither do the Spanish (or Portuguese) people seem to associate themselves with the historical empires those countries ruled.
In France this really depends, today, on the teacher.
When I was a kid in the 80s colonization was very lightly mentioned, mostly in the vontext of punitive comonies quch as Guyana.
Otherwise these territories were shown to children in mainland France as normal departments.
Today it is different. Colonies are part of the cirriculum but teachers have more leeway in appproching the topic. One of my children had the "we are genocide makers" version, when the other one was "colonization was a blessing for them" (I am overdrawing the picture)
In Italy the Eritrean and Ethiopian parts of our history are mentioned and nothing more, at least in the past.
There is a very good documentary about Italian war crimes which include the Ethiopian campaign, as well as the treatment of the Balkans by the Italian troops.
In the US, we covered a lot of old world colonial abuses in AP Euro and World History, but they are only briefly mentioned in regular courses. Irish and Armenian genocides were given special focus, probably mostly due to the demographics of the area I grew up in.
US and Eurocolonial treatment of the Native Americans was covered extensively in regular courses though, often alongside and explicitly compared to the Holocaust which is also covered extensively.
> Irish and Armenian genocides were given special focus, probably mostly due to the demographics of the area I grew up in.
There's just so much history to cover, and to be charitable to those who exclude events deemed important it can be that other events are deemed more important (especially by the local population) and there's only so much class time.
History instruction seems to be of two minds, either grand narratives (great men in the past, metrics-driven narratives like agricultural productivity now), or the case study approach where you sample some episodes from a variety of times and places and study each in depth. In both cases the approach must involve leaving some stories on the editing floor.
Just to add some (unprovoked) additional info here: I'm a 26 year old Canadian. We covered early Canadian history, abuse of the aboriginal peoples of Canada, war with America, and WW1/WW2/the Holocaust.
I don't think we were really taught at all about European/Asian history or the Soviet Union. I think I could have taken some classes related to those in highschool (secondary school), but for anyone working towards a non-history bachelor's degree those courses were generally not something that you could fit in your timetable.
I am 30. In all my schooltime history classes, we never covered any famine in India or the Global South. Only the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Irish Potato Famine, the Chinese famine, and maybe I'm forgetting a few. These are the main times famine showed up in our books. No discussion about Armenia, or any related such things. Population transfer policies of the USSR and China were discussed (and these are close to genocide). Native American extermination was obviously covered heavily. As was the role of slavery in American history up to the present day.
I believe there was also one in Africa committed by Belgium in the Congo? I remember seeing some photos of something cruel from there to this effect.
The Congo belonged personally to King Leopold of Belgian (not the Belgian state). His minions committed all sorts of atrocities, mainly in the pursuit of rubber. You can read about it online, but it is stomach churning stuff.
That's pretty recent. If you look at older US history school books, the physical and social genocide of the Native Americans is largely glossed over. It wasn't until after A People's History of the United States came out in the 80s that the school books slowly became more honest.
Not even mentioned? E.g. the great man-made famine of 1935 in the USSR is mentioned in the school history course in Russia. Post-Soviet, admittedly, but still closer in time by a century. To say nothing of the US school programs mentioning quite a bit of bad things that have been done by the Americans during the last couple of centuries.
What Americans don't learn about is that the famine we nearly triggered here during WWII was caused by seizing farms owned by Japanese Americans and then running them into the fucking ground. I've heard claims that the food rationing would have been totally unnecessary if not for that.
Most of them didn't get those farms back after the war either.
I'd learned about the internment camps from a human rights perspective, and the loss of family businesses, but I'm ashamed to admit I'd never learned about the economic impact until now.
I had to check the veracity of this, and it seems to be true. By 1945, Japanese American farms were responsible for 30%+ of the agricultural output of California.
I only heard about this a few years ago. About the fourth time I listened to someone talk about the camps. Which we did talk about during school but very briefly.
German curriculum is state and school difficulty level dependent to a degree, so what I say may not apply to Bavaria for example. I was taught quite extensively about the various German states with extra detail starting at the French revolution and very detailed Weimar and Third Reich.
Germany's role in colonialism was always limited compared to the other European powers. We were late to the game and lost them after WW1, so it was more of a footnote. It did mention our colonies in East Africa and South East Asia but only mentioned the genocide against the Herero without a mention of details.
The Atlantic Slave and trade was covered in great detail both in history and English lessons. Same for the Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of South and Middle America.
> Unsurprisingly, I don't think the Irish or Bengal famines were mentioned. In fact the whole British imperial project was largely glossed over. But lots of coverge of the Romans, Vikings, Normans, the black death and the two World Wars.
I read a ton of Usborne and Dorling Kindersley books and these were exactly the sorts or subjects they fixated on. I suppose it's probably part of some long-established national curriculum.
Where I live, people often (conspiratorially) complain that more serious subjects were not covered in school, but the only things I can't ever really remember covering involved South-and-4th-of-July-American history. We didn't really cover Africa outside of the 20th century, either.
To be honest I think American schools are the only ones who really give colonial history the attention it deserves because it's the basis of their entire country and then goes on to fill out the comparatively boring eighty or so years between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II. I find most people I talk to from the UK who are aware of some aspect of colonial history are either apologists for the British Empire or have this imported view common in North American (and especially Canadian) universities that the British were this uniquely nefarious force of evil. I suppose the historically curious ones just spend their time studying the Norman conquests.
I don't think the British empire was "uniquely nefarious", but I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious! I'm not aware of many former colonies celebrating Colonisation Day or bemoaning the withdrawal of the British Army from their territories.
Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
> I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious!
The Maori were eating each other before the British arrived - that's not hyperbole, they practised cannibalism. Upper caste Indians were throwing still-living women into fires so they could join their husbands in the afterlife. If the British arrived in these places as marauding pirates (and they did), they still come out ahead on these metrics alone.
> Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
Ironically that is where some of the worst atrocities occurred.
The British Empire ended the hideous practice of Sati ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice) ). It also unified India and built the railroads. The Indians paid a very heavy price for this though. The East India compoany was rapacious. Before the British colonised India, it was one of the richest countries in the world. When it left, it was one of the poorest.
It’s based on some of the same sources describing historical economies of other countries/regions. There are a variety of sources accessible online that go into more detail, including the ones cited in the excerpt I’ve included below.
> India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[12] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[13] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.[12]
Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society. Per capita, there’s no indication India was ever the richest. They did fall behind massively due to an inability to compete during industrialization though. The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
> Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society.
It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.
> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.
There is some information here about the British East India company pretty much destroyed the Indian textile industry through tarifs and other measures. Turning Indian from a leading textile manufacturer into a (much less profitable) producer of raw cotton for Britain's mills:
It isn't difficult to find examples of people misbehaving in the history of any country. That doesn't mean they are irredeemable and they need a British Army battalion to come and save them from themselves.
I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".
I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.
> I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites.
Interesting. What is this based on? When it comes to killings done by the British forces in India one of the most renowned, bloody and regrettable incidents in colonial history in India was the Massacre of Amritsar where British forces lost control and fired on a crowd of protesters. This resulted in around 400 deaths (many more injured). The reason this was such an infamous event is because of how uncharacteristic it was of British rule in India.
Like I said, it's a guess. I don't have firm numbers and I'm speculating. Aside from incidents like the one you described, I'm taking into account Wellington's military campaigns, which involved large-scale battles and entire kingdoms being conquered and subjugated. We are certainly talking about a death toll in the tens of thousands.
They did not lose control of a protest. The Indians were not permitted to assemble. When it was discovered that an assembly was meeting, the British entered the square where the assembly occurred and massacred those present.
Coming out of prion studies, laughing sickness, the Fore people in PNG, mad cow disease was a greater understanding of the defences everywhere in humans against prion related brain diseases .. these defences wouldn't exist if eating other humans wasn't relatively commonplace in human evolution.
In recorded European history we have "Corpse medicine" and eating bituminised mummies as a fad.
I was surprised that I had never heard of this, but as I investigated further I found the citations were sparse. All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg. Here's an excerpt from the About section of his website:
> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.
You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?
The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.
Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:
The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?
> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.
I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.
There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.
> The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper.
I never claimed that it did.
I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.
There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".
> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.
Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.
On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.
How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?
All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.
Napoleon is certainly a complicated figure and his raw ambition caused death and misery for millions. I don't think he carried out any genocides though, did he? I see an accusation of genocide online ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_Crimes ), but it doesn't sound very credible.
Complicated doesn't begin to describe him! I think that, by our modern standards, I would be very unhappy to be a citizen of Napoleon's empire.
However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!
Indeed, he didn't commit genocide, but his wars ended up killing 3.5 to 6 millions people, a staggering amount for the time.
Given that those deaths were basically because of his lust for territorial extension and disregard for human life, I would say we are in a similar ballpark as Mao, Hitler, Stalin, etc.
Of course, our history books are quick to state he made reforms, particularly legal and administrative ones, that benefitted our country a lot and still echo benefits today.
But again, I think if you a responsible for millions of deaths because of your desire for conquest, any arguments you can make in the other way are instantly moot.
You may, however, made the argument that it would have been better to be a French citizen at the time than somewhere else, depending on where and how you were born. But it's a different point.
So true. One of my better accomplishments as a parent is the BS detection skills of my kids. They’re respectful but make it clear when one of their teachers shift from facts to personal politics and bias. I’m always happy to answer emails from teachers with an agenda who get called on it by my kids.
Depends of the country, it can be done correctly. I also wish we taught historiography alongside history itself, it's an important part of building critical thinking.
> I went to school in the UK. Unsurprisingly, I don't think the Irish or Bengal famines were mentioned
There's a _lot_ of British history, and world history. There are several (5?) competing exam boards offering GCSEs and A Level's in history, and generally schools are free to choose between exam boards on a subject-by-subject basis. Each of these will offer an absolute multitude of historic periods, crises, etc, that again schools are free to choose from; history exam papers will offer students choices of questions depending on what they actually studied.
What you get taught in your history class at school in the UK is down to your school's Head of History, rather than a complex government-led conspiracy. If your school's Head of History wants to teach "Empire is Bad", they will have no trouble finding approved materials to do so!
I spent some times in Ireland and Northern Ireland recently. What the locals told me about the famine were:
- Most land were controlled by large land owners. Most peasants had very small farm land, which couldn't feed the people if normal crops were planted so they had to plant the higher yield potato to have enough food. When the disease wiped out the potato crop, most people went without any food.
- The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals.
- The ruling class consisted of large land owners and British transplants in the Northern Ireland after the conquering of Ireland by Britain could care less about the shortage of food. They actively hid the problem from the central government in Britain. The governor/duke/whoever tried to sweep the problem under the rug to avoid appearing as incompetent.
- When the central government in Britain learned of the famine, they acted too late and too little, unwilling to spend money to deal with the emergency. Britain at the time looked down on the Irish people in general.
This led to great animosity of the Irish people to Britain, driving the subsequent independent movements.
Fun fact, about 10% of the U.S. population are of Irish descent, due to massive immigration from Ireland in the following years after the famine.
Buildings and roads yeah. Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then, this was the time of the New Poor Law (oft called the starvation act) and the workhouses.
Being poor was considered a major personal failing.
Yeah, it's definitely a change to the narrative for people outside of Ireland. The podcast opened my eyes to it, and also the Famine song by Sinead O'Connor
FTA (for anyone's benefit):
> In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.
> The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.
It would be darkly poetic if Brexit brought these same conditions to the UK as a whole if they had crop failures one year.
(To make it clear for the pedant literal crowd - I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor do I want it to happen. I'm simply commenting on how poetic it would be.)
> Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then
That particular peak is probably much older. Charity at a non-negligible scale to distant (meaning "not literally in visual range") people has been very rare throughout history.
Nope! I’m not going to claim it was great before, but Britain was actively regressing as the Whigs took control and followed the ideas of Malthus and Bentham. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (new poor law) was specifically design to check on and significantly downgrade the body of old poor law.
When the Irish crossed the Atlantic, looking for a better life, they travelled on what became known as "coffin ships". It was common for 20-30% of the passengers to die during transit, and sometimes reportedly up to 50%.
As an interesting factoid these sort of mortality figures were not especially uncommon in naval voyages until surprisingly recently. Scurvy is kind of a joke now a days, but it killed millions of people. It was such a big deal that vitamin c is literally named after it - ascorbic acid, or anti-scurvy acid. But that only happened on into the 20th century!
The idea that such a brutal disease could have been prevented by eating fresh fruits and meats sounded more like a folktale than reality. And early experiments to try to demonstrate this were also not that conclusive since vitamin c tends to break down rapidly in the conditions it was stored in (prejuiced - metal containers). For instance during Vasco de Gamma's journey from Europe to India he lost more than half his crew, mostly to scurvy.
And not all that survived the trip across made it much further. Typhoid or "ship fever" was killing a lot of the passengers and when they arrived in North America, they were put into quarantine camps where many died.
If you include Northern Ireland, it's 7.2 million. But it was 8.5 million before the famine; 6.5 immediately after. After that emigration drove that number down.
The population size never recovered to pre famine levels.
Census data I found is that Ireland has about 7.1 people.
But it also says that the year before the shit completely hit the fan, the Ireland population topped out at 8.18m. 10 years later it was down 1.6m, and another .6m after another 10. And it just kept trending downwards until the 1930's, (4.21m) and bottomed out again in ~1960 before it started growing again.
I suspect it means: With mass immigration occurring in Ireland at the rate it is, soon the proportion of ethnic Irish in Ireland's population may match the proportion of ethnic Irish in the US's population.
Hyperbole is a common facet of humour (to make a point) in the British Isles.
I think GP is saying the Irish speak and write a more beautiful or clever English, the language adopted from their conquerors, than in the USA, or perhaps even England.
The fact that food was still being exported while people starved is just staggering. No wonder it left such deep scars and fueled the push for independence
In the Akkadian empire, archeologists found that every family house had a place to store wheat and other grains. That suggests that every family had the right to own enough land to survive.
With all the respect and admiration I have for vast swathes of the population of that fair and noble land, one could nonetheless answer this title-question in a historically accurate and quite pithy manner, by stating simply:
Although written earlier, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a chilling satire about the destitute of the Irish at the time and the English attitudes toward it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal.
The economist Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize partially for his research on famines and the conclusion that most are social and political. He was a young child during the Bengal famine (famously not due a food shortage) and witnessed it up close.
> Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century;[25] coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine
I grew up on a farm near the hills of The Burren in the west of Ireland. If you look closely, you can see walls made of stacked stones cross-crossing the hills, as if to demarcate farmland - but those hills are not arable farmland, so why? The British refused to offer free food to the starving, so they made people build these completely pointless walls to “earn” the food. They’re now known as the Famine Walls.
Whenever I see a tragedy, calamity, crash or whatever I almost always see one common factor: a lack of diversity somewhere. In this case it was in domestic food production. Whenever you look in nature and say 'that looks like a healthy ecosystem' it is almost always a system that is diverse and conversely when you see an ecosystem in distress it is generally lacking in diversity. As far as I know, diversity is the only real long term survival algorithm out there.
[edit] I should point out that I am not commenting on the cause of that lack of diversity, just the result of it.
The lack of diversity was not in food production, but rather in land ownership, and being able to own the fruits of your own labor. Plenty of food, just none of it for the Irish because they did not own the land.
I think the evidence says you can have both. When I say 'the evidence' I mean just looking at nature. In nature you clearly see animals and plants that are massively more efficient at tasks than their ancestors all while living in more diverse environments and in larger numbers so clearly you can get both efficiency and flexibility gains. I think though your point has merit but I am finding it hard to write a super clear example of it. Maybe this is because there is a confusion between efficiency and temporary advantage? I think of efficiency more like an attempt to get the maximum infinite gain while a temporary advantage attempts to maximize the immediate gain only. It isn't an efficiency gain if you go out of business in 5 years just so you get a windfall now. With that in mind it is clear that you can create temporary advantages very easily but they may not be long term efficiency gains. Figuring out what is just a temporary gain and what is a long term efficiency gain is hard though. There are no crystal balls to tell you the truth of the future. Diversity in a system means that you will have a lot of different approaches to the problem to try which gives you more of a chance to find the long term efficiency instead of just a temporary advantage.
My parents were Irish,English so I'm always caught in the middle.
It's obvious that many English people are inclined to ignore the opium trade or the famine and think about bits of history that make them feel good. I'd just mention that almost nobody is without skeletons in their national closet of one kind of another - probably less bad.
I am 50 and my understanding has changed over time. Like every teenager I wanted to be proud of who I was but fortunately being a mongrel creates a note of discord in one's head - who to be proud of?
The need to feel proud is a driver of all sorts of shit. We shouldn't feel ever more than a little proud or proud of what we personally have done but I'm not even sure of that. It's always a simplification. One should not have to call on history to respect oneself.
Irish people made use of the Empire too and went to the colonies to seek their fortunes. My dad was one. I was born in one and saw the recent Irish immigrants behaviour - they were a mixed bag like everyone else. Most were sort of ok and one or two were atrocious but not more or less than anyone else.
As a gross over-simplification, I think history is about people conquering other people and building larger and larger groups which become kingdoms then nations then empires or federations or unions. I get this feeling that it's mathematical. Whoever can organise on a large scale will absorb whoever is smaller.
So if we want to have a reasonable future, we must learn to organise on a large scale with negotiation and rules/laws so that someone can't absorb us by doing it the violent way.
During this time, Ireland exported food to the mainland, lest british contracts be voided creating future doubt about the integrity of trade (or so I was taught)
OK, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically I want to talk about the "famine"
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no "famine"
See, Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
All of the other food, meat, fish, vegetables
Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starved
In 1847, one of the bleakest years of the Irish famine, Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I, Sultan of an Ottoman Empire offered £10,000 (which was quite a sum at the time) to help alleviate the suffering of the Irish people.
Queen Victoria, upon learning of this, requested that he reduce his donation to a more modest £1,000, so as not to embarrass her own relatively meagre offering of £2,000. Reluctantly, the Sultan agreed, but bolstered his contribution by secretly sending five ships loaded with food.
I agree with your conclusion, but this story is very badly sourced and really should not be used [0]. We only have two sources from the 1800s that claim it: one is contemporary but provides no attribution and we have no reason to believe they had firsthand knowledge. The other is 40 years later and is attributed to a conversation with the son of the sultan's personal physician. Yeah.
With such bad evidence for such an incendiary claim, I think we're better off sticking with the enormous amount of other evidence that policy caused the famine and letting this particular story die.
(What is true and backed up by evidence is that the sultan sent £1k. The rest has no reliable source.)
> He had originally offered £10,000 to the British Relief Association and some ships
laden with provisions, but had been advised by British diplomats that British
Royal protocol meant that nobody should contribute more than the Queen. It was suggested
that he gave half the sum contributed by Victoria.
That was published in 2013. Do you have a physical copy that would allow you to see footnote 64 and see where this author got the story?
(The Google book has a lot of footnote 64s at the bottom, but it's impossible to see which corresponds to which chapter or to know if the 64 we're looking for is even there at all.)
The Ottoman Sultan's donation (or the US$170/£111 famously donated by a group of Native American Choctaw Nation, which is verified historical fact [0][1][2], or the £14,000 donated by Calcutta in 1846 [0], which is > Queen Victoria's subsequent 1848 donation) have nothing to do with arguing that British policy caused the famine.
They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed that their own charitable donations to a famine that killed 1 in 8 Irish people, were not that much and could be rivaled or outdonated (Calcutta) by private groups, even groups like the Choctaw who had just survived the Trail of Tears forced displacement/genocide 16 years before. (This is commemorated today by sculptures in Midleton, County Cork, Ireland "Kindred Spirits" and a companion sculpture in Tuskahoma, OK "Choctaw Ireland Monument"). By implication the Crown wasn't at all exercised about changing the setup in Ireland where most of the population were tenant farmers on the 90% of the land was foreign-owned. The landlords made a lot of money on exporting grain (esp. during the Napoleonic Wars until the price crashed). The tenants had essentially zero political representation in Westminster.
Nearly two centuries later, Ireland's population (all-island, Republic + NI) has still not recovered to the pre-Famine peak (1841, 8.175m est.) [3]. Predicted to finally happen sometime in the 2050s.
Curious if anyone has documented the massive imbalance in ownership in land in pre-Famine Ireland and compared it to other historical situations (Russia, colonial Americas, Africa, India, 1930s Ukraine) and their eventual outcomes.
> They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed
Again, to be clear, this anecdote is not verified. It is extremely poorly sourced, not much more than an urban legend. The only attribution for the story dating to the 19th century is a claim that someone heard it from the sultan's physician's son, and that claim is put forward more than 40 years after the events.
The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is the claim that I'm responding to. I'm not questioning that others did send donations or that some of those donations exceeded those put forward by the British government.
All of that is true, but it being true does not justify perpetuating unsubstantiated stories that happen to support the same conclusion. As you have amply demonstrated, there's enough good evidence in favor of the conclusion that we don't need to rely on bad evidence.
> > They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed
"They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.
> The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is to claim that I'm responding to.
But it's also claimed the Sultan's ships had to sail secretly, and north of Dublin to Drogheda, instead of simply unloading in Dublin, which would be faster and infinitely more logical (because the famine areas were in the west/southwest/south, not the northeast). So no, that would be a second piece of corroboration that he had needed to make the donation secretly (Why? Unless he had a fetish for being the Bruce Wayne of the 1840s. It makes no sense unless there was a reason.)
If I ever get a time machine I guess I'm dialing it to Sultan Abdülmecid's and Queen Victoria's residences in 1847 to plant listening devices to settle this for once and all. :)
But either way, even if the Ottomans never existed, the British Crown response was embarrassing, everything else is a sidebar. This all feels like it needs an AI treatment starring Joan Sims as Queen Victoria in one of the British "Carry On" comedies, and Syd James as the Sultan, and Paul Whitehouse ("Ralph and Ted") as token Irish tenant farmer. "Carry On Famine Relief".
> "They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.
Oh, I was interpreting your comment as relevant to mine rather than completely tangential. My mistake, as you were.
My comment is directly responsive to yours (and you now have triplicate threads where you're repeatedly challenging why): under all circumstances the Crown's response was inadequate, and disputing the anecdote about the Crown allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching that exact conclusion.
Further I showed you an independent piece of corroboration about whether the Sultan had to donate in secret, so it's absolutely not single-sourced to "one anecdote forty lears later by the Sultan's son."
Here's more corroboration by Drogheda people (and former President McAleese) that the Ottoman famine relief ships did in fact land in Drogheda (and inexplicably, not Dublin): https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-c...
Since there is zero reason to waste time sailing urgently-needed food aid ships north past Dublin to a smaller port (Drogheda) from which it would take longer to distribute, that raises the obvious question why they did that. Go look at any map of Ireland to verify that, instead of mocking that.
Something even more remarkable, the Indians that where only a few years ago forcibly relocated and experienced their own starvations during the events of the Trail of Teers, collected about 700$ in donations and send it as aid to the starving Irish in a grand gesture of empathy amongst oppressed people.
Wikipedia says that the provenance is... sketchy, to say the least:
> The claim that he had wanted to give £10,000 first appears in Taylor & Mackay's Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (1851), but the book is not referenced and no source is given. A second source, dating to 1894, is more explicit: the Irish nationalist William J. O'Neill Daunt claimed to have heard from the son of the sultan's personal physician that he "had intended to give £10,000 to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only subscribed £1000, would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum…"
The 1,000 Pound claim at least can be sourced from this website.
It very much was policy that killed the Irish and not the lack of food. Ireland exported enough food to feed the country four times over -- during the Famine.
This source notably does not make the claim that the amount was lowered in response to a request from Queen Victoria, which is the actually damning claim.
You seriously don't think that Calcutta donating more (£14,000) in 1846 and two years earlier than Queen Victoria (1848) isn't a damning fact? (and the Calcutta donation is a verified fact. So no need to dispute the anecdote about the Sultan's donation.)
As I mentioned in my response to your other comment, the controversial part of the anecdote is the claim that Victoria actually intercepted sent aid and convinced someone through diplomatic pressure to lower their intended donation.
OP does not bring up any additional donations besides the purported attempted donation from the sultan, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up as some kind of controversial thing: You're literally the first person to mention it here.
As I've said in my other comments, there's plenty of evidence that the British government both did far less than they should have to help with the famine and there's also evidence that they willfully exacerbated it. I fully accept and appreciate that. I have no clue why you're waving that evidence at me as some kind of gotcha when the only thing I'm disputing is this single specific story.
I specifically brought up the other donations to show that the Crown's response was inadequate, and the Calcutta donation in 1846 was both earlier and larger, this not only before Queen Victoria had not yet donated but not yet started (in 1847) encouraging Protestant landowners to fundraise in lieu of donating herself...
So under all circumstances her behavior wasn't impressive. Ok? I'm suggesting that disputing the anecdote about allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching the same conclusion.
Agreed. So there's no need to perpetuate claims whose provenance is "someone 40 years later claimed to have heard this from the sultan's physician's son" (see my reply to GP). We have plenty else to use.
Are we 100% in agreement that Queen Victoria's donation in 1848 was inadequate to prevent 1 million people from starving to death, and that Britain had direct responsibility for the gross inequality in land ownership that constituted Ireland in the 1840s, whereas the Ottoman Sultans, or Calcutta (or the Choctaw Nation) had zero responsibility?
I mean we could look at British spending (govt and crown) in the period 1845-52. Or note that Queen Victoria was one of the wealthiest women in the world, and Parliament granted her an annuity of £385,000 per year.
Yes, but the notion that a donation 10x larger was declined for optics is so fundamentally different from those claims I can’t even believe that there is any confusion here about how ridiculous including that is.
Why isn't "How did Queen Victoria spend her yearly £385,000 in 1845, and 1846, and 1847, and 1848" infinitely more relevant to deciding whether her documented lack of meaningful intervention should be considered embarrassing or not? I don't accept your framing at all.
No one is questioning that all of this is relevant to the famine. All we're saying is that this specific story quoted by OP is most likely fictitious, so we're better off focusing on all of the other evidence and facts (such as the facts that you're bringing up).
I honestly have no clue what you're trying to argue here: No one is actually arguing with any of your points, nor did either of us give any indication that we would disagree with them in comments before you came. What you're bringing up is essentially a non-sequitur to what this subthread is actually about.
Conversely, I'm saying that disputing the anecdote about allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching the inescapable conclusion that the Crown's response was embarrassing and dwarfed by other donations (e.g. Calcutta).
(We have multiple threads on this, if you want to respond let's pick one to make primary.)
When political pride outweighs human lives, you know something is deeply broken. Definitely reinforces the idea that famines are rarely just about food shortages
> It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical reform of land ownership, which passed to a new class of Catholic farmers. The profoundly uncomfortable truth is that Ireland started to become modern when its poorest people were wiped out or sent into exile—a reality that is too painful to be faced without deep unease.
This makes the struggle to keep the Irish language feel like such a vital urge today. Those of you who live in SF be sure to check out the Unite Irish Cultural Center by the zoo.
Reading about the export of so much food while people starve reminds me also of the Holodomor, a famine where farmers grain was stolen from them and exported from the country while children starved in the streets. I have never seen a precentage of the population represented as here, but the estimates are 3M to 7M died from famine in the Ukrainian SSR, and today the population is 40M. And it's not as if nobody knew what was going on, when Stalin's second wife confronted him on his actions causing so much death, she was met with such a verbal assault that she committed suicide [ https://archive.is/xsCpP ]. The greed and lust for power and money to cause the death of millions is not limited to capitalism. I know of many strong connections between Ukrainians and Irish people, and have no doubt that this rhyming history may play into it.
The cause of these famines may be proximally blamed on a shortage of one type of crop, but when food is being exported from adjacent farms, as happened in both An Gorta Mor and the Holodomor, the true cause is not the lack of growing, the cause is the lack of control of the fruits on ones laber. People not being able to control their own land, not having a widespread group of smallholders of land that can benefit from their own work, from not having administrative control by the majority of people. There's a lesson for us who farm digital land; do we own the land or are we sharecropping?
We must fight autocracy in all its forms, lest many of us starve. Those who oppose democracy have killed millions and will do so again if given the chance.
We went to the Dunbrody Famine ship exhibit in New Ross, Ireland a few years back. It was a neat exhibit, first they seat you in a dark small room and show a movie detailing the situation, then the wall opens up and the ship is nicely framed in the view, sitting outside in the River Barrow.
"Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" is a great book by Mike Davis about similar famines in the late 19th century caused by colonial powers putting profits and the sanctity of markets above human lives during periods when forces in the natural world impacted food production (climate swings in this case).
After some discussion with some friends from the former "colonizer", it just occurred to me that apparently it's very hard for people from those countries to appreciate their countries' role for a lot of massacre, genocide or any man made disaster like this kind of famine.
They always find ways to deflect their countries responsibilities with some "reasons", although they generally agree that any kind of genocide is wrong.
I think this is what we witness today too, with some massacres and genocides going on. People from those colonizer countries just can't relate to the victims.
Maybe deep down they acknowledge that those genocides are good, or at least necessary, because those things are what brings them prosperity they enjoy today.
“The British” did not genetically engineer the potato blight.
Further, in the 19th century state capacity was small and massive modern style relief programmes were not possible. Despite this, Britain managed to spend a large degree of GDP on relief. Proportionately more than it did on covid response recently, for example.
The reason people deny british culpability for “genocide” is that there was no “genocide” and britain did what it was able to do, to an unprecedented degree in fact. If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
>If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
Some examples of Britain's response:
* Establishing soup kitchens for the starving, where, to acquire food one must renounce your religion, anglicise your name, and abandon your native tongue.
* Provide maize for the starving and destitute but not for free for fear it would generate a sense of self-importance amongst the millions who are dying of hunger
* Maintaining the exportation vast amounts of food to Britain throughout the Great Hunger
* Requiring the starving who couldn't afford to buy food from the British to build pointless walls in order to earn that food
* Forcibly evicting the starving and dying from their homes because they couldn't pay their rent for some reason
* Denying aid to anyone who owned more than a quarter-acre of land, forcing starving farmers to give up their land and become destitute in order to qualify for relief
So, on behalf of all those before me in Ireland; go raibh maith agat.
The entire reason there was a famine was due to absentee landlords who demanded absolutely everything but the bare minimum from farmers for the "right" to work on "their" land.
This may be an unpopular take, and my 99.6% celtic DNA won't justify it, but perhaps St Patrick still hasn't stopped driving the snakes out of Ireland, and these days he's resorted to famine, insurgency and abortion to accomplish it?
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.
Crop failures are natural disasters. Famine's are political disasters.
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!
Also Irish person here. My primary school was 100m from one of the old workhouses, and I was taught from maybe age 7 what happened there. All the old stone walls in the nearby fields were built by forced famine labor. There's abandoned roads to nowhere (famine roads) all around, likewise built by forced labor.
I think it was taught quite well, and people around me while I was growing up didn't downplay it. It's still a significant event in the Irish psyche, especially in the parts of the country most deeply effected at the time.
The things it's, though, it's a fairly distant historical event at this stage, and I don't think it's healthy or helpful to the Irish collective psyche to hold on to it as strongly as we still do - not just the famine but all aspects our being "the oppressed". We're no longer oppressed, we're a privileged and filthy rich country (even if it doesn't feel like that right now, but we have no one to blame for the housing crisis except our own politicians and capitalists).
While we should be mindful of the English tendency to play down and rewrite history, I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English - defended with the tired caveat the "oppressed people can't be racist towards the oppressors". Yes, they can. Maybe it's a less harmful form of racism, but it holds back the psychological development of the person with racist views nonetheless.
In secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates. There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.
I'm not saying any of this to defend the English - they did terrible things in history, and those must not be forgotten or rewritten. There's also a fair few English people who are racist towards Irish too, not to mention a lot of "harking back to the glory days of Empire", mostly from older English men whose ancestors were probably peasants back then.
But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche which I struggled with a lot growing up, and it holds back out country. It's time we moved on.
Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.
> I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English
I'm Irish. I've spent a lot of time in the countryside and the cities. This is not true. It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British
> secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates.
These days its justa catchy rebel chant. It does not necessarily mean the people chanting it support the IRA
> There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.
No there's not.
I can think of maybe 2 pubs in Dublin you might get an unfrindly welcome. On a bad day.
> But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche
You're really really over stating how prevalent this is
> a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off.
We did. Remember the referendum? The one where we collectively voted to remove the territorial claim from our constitution?
Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.
There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.
> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British
Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.
> Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.
Maybe we have different lived experiences? We can both be Irish and have very different lives and experiences, small country though it is.
For me, nothing I said is exaggerated. Irish people do hate to state things directly though, and I'm used to be told to be quiet whenever I speak out about our issues.
> There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.
Another Irish person here… Going to have to agree with biorach on this one, but not by a lot.
>> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British
>Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.
The Irish that are racist against the British are, in my experience, the American who have things to say about other groups, ethnicities, religions.
Not uncommon, not prolific, but not the crowd you’d go hang out with either.
Sure, it's unhelpful to dwell too much on the past, but I don't think the Ireland of today is as consumed by victimhood or anti-Britishness as you are making out. I don't doubt there are pockets of society where anti-British sentiment is still strong but there is no society in the world without similar pockets of backwards, racist thinking. By and large, Irish people do not dislike or begrudge British people. While Brexit stoked some of the old tensions (again, we were far from the only country getting frustrated with Britain during those negotiations) we have, both before and since, largely regarded the British as our friends and allies.
The famine was a huge event in our history. Our population still hasn't recovered from it and the mass emigration it triggered still has an impact on our relations with other countries, particularly the US. We shouldn't be (and aren't) consumed by it but it would be madness to forget it. The same goes for our broader struggle for independence, which is literally the origin story of our country.
> Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.
The Irish position on the North is clear and has been since 1998. We don't lay claim to it so there is nothing to "let go". No one questions the right of the North to choose its own way, but equally we have a relationship and a history with that part of the island that we cannot just ignore.
It’s important to teach about bad times during the good times, because the horrors of what humans are capable of seem unfathomable with time and distance.
I'm American of Irish descent and have spent a lot of time in Ireland. The walls mentioned were sort of an academic trick. They had to do "work" to get "paid" and so they were made to just build walls so that they could then be paid in food and not starve.
If you hike around and see them, it's stunning. They were handmade. The rocks weren't insitu, they were carried in. It's not the pyramids, but in a relatively contemporary time they were made rather than just providing assistance.
"Up the RA" is a great slogan. The IRA made an important and undeniable contribution to Irish statehood. I don't think we'd be "a privileged and filthy rich country" were it not for their activities in the 20th century. There is an unfortunate tendency among some people to be unwilling to recognise that for fear of offending our neighbours to the east. As you say, it's in the distant past and not worth getting too offended about.
This discussion is a relevant time to recommend the fantastic book called "Late Victorian Holocausts:
El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" by the indomitable late Mike Davis.
The author wants you to believe the Irish Famine was caused by free-market extremism. This couldn't be further from the truth. Ireland wasn’t starving because of free markets — it was starving because Britain’s mercantilist policies blocked it from importing food from outside the empire.
The British forced Ireland to rely on their overpriced grain, banned direct imports from the U.S. and Europe, and kept tariffs high with the Corn Laws — all while millions starved. That’s not laissez-faire. That’s imperial economic control designed to keep Ireland dependent on politically connected domestic producers.
O’Toole’s omission of this amounts to deception. He’s twisting history to fit a narrative, blaming capitalism while letting British trade restrictions, protectionism, and outright exploitation off the hook.
The Irish Famine was a disaster of Britain's mercantilist policies. Whitewashing that to score political points for his illiberal domestic agenda is an insult to history.
The mercantilist economic policy of the UK was an abject failure that made its people poorer and prevented the import of cheap food.
But the UK’s unwillingness to provide sufficient aid once the famine had already started was motivated by laissez-faire politics and a Malthusian belief that the famine was the Irish’s own fault for overbreeding.
Remember that the government with the support of the Whigs and Radicals actually repealed the Corn Laws, it was just too little too late. Ironically the Whig’s free market beliefs if enacted in policy much earlier might have prevented the famine from happening in the first place, while simultaneously meaning they weren’t interested in properly mitigating it once it did happen.
This is the story historians and people of Irish extraction (almost 12% of the US population, including myself) pay more attention to. Lots of people fled during the Famine and found their way to the US.
dredmorbius pointed it out already, but I think there was a misunderstanding here. I don't know what did or didn't cause the famine (that's why I said "maybe so" above). I just know that your GP comment took the form of an internet snark post, rather than a thoughtful informative comment. We want the latter, not the former, on HN.
That's the difference, btw, between your GP comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326908, which I agree was a good post. Your post and that one are taking more or less the same position but one is snarky and lacks information, while the other is snark-free and provides plenty of information.
The man in charge of the British response to the great hunger was Charles Trevelyan. He famously said of the Irish "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God's providence."
The British actively exported grains meats and other food leaving the local population to starve.
He also famously suggested that the Irish should simply grow corn, if there was a potato blight. As if, in the middle of a famine, farmers can simply pivot to another crop that they've never grown before.
I don’t think Ireland grows corn today. The wiki page for Irish agriculture doesn’t even mention it, which I interpret as “not enough grown to be noteworthy”.
We grow maize, which is what we call corn, here. In significant quantities, using modern agricultural methods. Even with that the climate is not totally suitable and it is mostly used for animal feed.
I very much doubt it would have been possible to grow sustainable amounts of maize up until recent decades
And unless something changes with corn strains and agriculture, possibly not again in another four or five. It's a very thirsty boy. Both in water and nitrogen.
to me that is the gist. Genocide by the system without the people in the system intending it to happen (with those people even trying to mitigate its damage) It has been happening again and again - a system follows orthodoxy/ideology despite its subjects mass dying as a result, and we still don't have a machinery in place which should serve as emergency brakes on any system once that system, for whatever, and frequently even good sounding reasons at that, starts to cause such pain and suffering and deaths:
>Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
>Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve. I'd suspect they were enforcing the laws of public order and trade. That is the systemic issue - the laws taking precedence over mass starving. And we still don't have a good solution to such issues - just look at the recent court decision and city actions on homeless even here in Silicon Valley, one of the most richest place. And 700M people faced hunger in 2023. Almost 10%. Why we can't help them? I see the same systemic issue as the machinery of the current economic order (really powerful, no doubt, and the best we could so far come up with as a civilization) still fails here.
This is very clever and an interestingly adversarial (the unjust steal from the just) take on the quote that came to my mind:
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
I didn’t have a Hacker News thread where George Pataki is held up as some fenian and British sailors shelling a starving mob are misunderstood, well-intentioned chaps on my bingo card.
Yet here we are. Should you ever find yourself up against the wall during the revolution, take solace that the boys don’t take it personally at all.
> I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve.
While I take your broader point about it being a system level issue - when you’re firing cannon at starving people so you can continue to export their food, you’re complicit, laws be damned.
That is the point - after countless deaths we produced the principle of "carrying out a criminal order is a crime", yet we still see the people committing atrocities and going unpunished because they were just carrying out the orders. And that makes me think that we're still missing something important.
Apparently we don't like this idea that a "system" can cause a genocide. Instead, we rather want to believe that only people with bad intentions are doing bad things, and that if something dramatic happen it must be because some people wanted it that way, despite the enormous amount of evidence showing that our individual volition adds almost no weigh in the course of history.
I suppose that this fallacy comes partly from the fear that people guilty of criminal negligence or hateful prejudice would escape punishment. Like that person who mentioned Nuremberg in his response. Well, no of course, that many circumstances are necessary for a genocide to happen beside just the will of the criminals, do not free anyone participating in it from the responsibilities of their actions (or lack thereof).
But I also suspect this is coming from a deeper, darker psychological bias. This belief that there are "villains" behind every crime may just be the necessary belief to justify our own wrong behavior. We do not intend to cause any harm to anyone, yet we let a lot of unjust things happen every day. We walk past some people in need for assistance every day, but we can't help everyone right?, on our way to work in some IT corporation that's also helping build bombs or military IA that's going to be used in yet another unfair war but a good defense industry is necessary right? So in order for this thought to work as justification, we need to believe that, as long as we do not intend to cause harm, then we are in the green.
The machinery we need to prevent the system we all play a small part into from causing such crimes of historical scale is that we should acknowledge and learn about the system. That's not enough to learn history ; in an advanced democratic society we would learn some sociology from middle school.
> the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognize that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.”
I’m sure that high minded distinction would be appreciated by the barely self-sufficient tenant farmer, banished to the west when his ancestors were ethnically cleansed a few generations past, when he was evicted and left to starve.
This wasn’t capitalism any more than the depredations in India or Africa. It was a colonial state, which existed to extract considerable wealth to build and support a vast empire.
I think performing apologetics for a system that resulted in the genocide of a people is a difficult position to hold. At some point you need to hold the people who perpetuate the system accountable for the devastation it causes. This is a difficult thing to do on a SV based startup forum. I love drones!
It isn't apologetic. It is a statement of "we're still not able to fix/avoid it or similar to it" almost 200 years later.
> At some point you need to hold the people who perpetuate the system accountable for the devastation it causes.
Naturally, that beyond the debate. Unfortunately we still fail to effectively unwind the system behavior back to responsible people (and there is whole theory on whether in general it is possible at all and to what extent)
"There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now."
There’s no famines going on anywhere in Latin America. Yet we had more immigrants to the U.S. last year than during the entire ten year period from Ireland during the great famine.
...do you mean per capita? because all of latin america has north of 600 million people, versus (at the time of the famine) ireland's ~7 million, so "more" would in strict terms be very unsurprising. Like it would basically be a given that a whole continent contributes far more immigrants than a small country.
Google's automated result on "irish immigration to america during the potato famine" suggests ~1.5 million Irish folks resettled in America during the famine, though the first source I checked[1] claimed ~2M. No automated google result came back for "total latin american immigration to america 2015-2025", but this article[2] claims that the immigrant latin american population was ~2.73M in 2010 and ~3.91M in 2020, an increase of 1.2M people over 12 years. That feels like it could be low, so a second check over on Wikipedia[3] claims that total immigration from "the americas", including Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc., totaled ~4.22 M from 2012-2022, the most recently included year. Technically that is more in absolute numbers, if you also stretch the definition of Latin America, I guess?
So, what the heck are you talking about? Can you back those claims up?
You might wonder why the state of affairs in Latin America drives people to hard lives in the US.
A certain large country to the north had a policy of destabilizing economic, covert action and direct military action in place to save these nations from the horrors of socialism.
When you build empire, there’s always a pull of your subjects to the center.
Preventing Latin American countries from forming alliances with the USSR does not constitute turning Latin American into imperial possessions: they are different levels of influence or control.
American imperialism moved past that. Our tools are economics and banking. Places like Central America and Indonesia were all about economics. Guatemala has historically been dominated by fruit companies.
Sometimes it spills over. The domination of Chile transitioned from pulling the levers of banking and capital access to a full on CIA sponsored coup, followed by the Pinochet experience. NAFTA was great for the top-line numbers for the US and Canada, but nuked the Mexican agricultural economy. (Repeating what we did within the US)
Critical thinking is a good thing. When you read about people packing up their family and meager belongings to walk through hostile Mexico, to then pay a gangster to smuggle you across the Sonora, so you can work some menial labor job in the US… the question “why?” should come to mind.
Let's not argue semantics here: The fact that latin american countries did not turn into Puerto Rico does not mean the imperialist action was not executed.
> Do you realize that if the USA had been run the way you advocate that you'd never have lived there in the first place?
Of course! But I’m not a child and I’m capable of conceiving of what would be “good” separate and apart from what would be “good for me.”
Indeed, as someone with a large south asian family that immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia, and who is especially well acquainted with Anglo-Protestant culture, I’m particularly well positioned to form the opinions that: (1) assimilation is slow and doesn’t happen completely; and (2) even high skill immigration, at scale, isn’t conducive to maintaining our american participatory democracy.
There has been large scale migration throughout recorded history. Just look at the endless problems the Romans had with the migration of groups such as the Goths and the Vandals, who were themselves displaced by the Huns.
This should be your daily reminder that every famine is political, meaning it is the result of one group of people willing to starve another group of people. In this case, the British starved the Irish.
This whole thing was exacerbated by relatively few landholders and a system of rent-seeking landlords that only worked when there was a good potato crop so when that failed, the English remained fed, the land tenants could no longer produce enough to eat and the Irish starved.
The world now produces an excess of food yet millions die of famine every year. We are quite deliberately letting people starve while food rots.
The world produces excess of food but the distribution costs are very high for example. Would you go into debt sending food to another country or are you relying on the government to bear the burden of that through taxes? There’s a secondary factor which is that we’ve learned through efforts in the 80s that charity breeds dependence and the food aid drives often had a paradoxical effect of preventing those countries from building up their own local farm base which is more harmful long term for everyone involved. I don’t think it’s quite clear and dry as you paint it and that every famine is the result of one group intentionally trying to starve another.
Well, that's the thing, right? If we were thinking about humanity as a global populace, the second (bear the burden of that through taxes) would be the obvious answer, for precisely the same reason Americans in Florida pay taxes into a FEMA system to address wildfires in California, even if they never visit California. Besides ideological reasons, there's also the practical that that same FEMA is going to help Florida the next time it's hurricane season.
The concern about suppressing local agriculture is relevant (although I do wonder if one can make the same argument regarding FEMA and "suppressing local blue-tarp manufacturing"). But if food rots while people starve, the taxes probably aren't high enough. We've recognized (in the US, at least) the role of government in distribution and management of distribution policy since at least the Great Depression.
For the couple of remaining places with hunger, the causes are political as you say. But the rest of the world is in most cases not "letting it" happen. We're sending food and aid, sometimes at risk to the aid workers delivering the food.
You can make the case for that, but a disorderly transition to that kind of system will ensure that some people starve to death before the new system is in place.
I don't have any of the purported 'savings' in my pocket right now and I don't suppose I'll see them any time soon, so I don't have any extra money. Quite the contrary, what with the stock market tanking.
well, that didn't work (waiting for audits and transparency) for 20+ years, so we're doing it this way now. Donate to causes you believe in, don't rely on the government to do good. do it yourself.
Depends who "we" are in this context of course, but there's a middle eastern country whom the USA shower with military aid, that is committing a genocide and using starvation as a weapon, and the US is absolutely letting, even encouraging that to happen.
I've always seen it as a logistical problem. With the Irish famine the British had a sophisticated world spanning logistical system that deliberately de-prioritized the Irish, even during an active famine that was a consequence of their own design. It's hard not to point fingers here when the culprit is obvious.
With modern famines it becomes more nuanced though imo. The logistical systems are not already in place like with Ireland, they are often built and sustained reactively, like a bridge during a storm. Some never "turn off" properly and undercut local farmers creating a stronger potential for future famines in the region. The solution isn't just allowing everyone to starve of course, but doing a better job at the follow-up work.
I'm not saying this is some impossible problem, just that it's a delicate one despite best intentions. Food grown in abundance in one region of the world might be rotting by the time it arrives where it's needed. While we have systems through the UN and non profits for this I still think we could do a lot better.
They used that logistics system to export most of the food that Ireland produced as they were growing more food than they needed, not even counting potatoes. But the English would pay more, so another great free market experiment.
Which is why most non-failed countries try to self-sustain a large amount of their food requirements and agriculture is subsidized and protected. But it also means food export isn't a big business.
They all subside agriculture and do seek ability to produce necessary food. That does not excludes trade or import - you can live without bananas and oranges if you can't produce them. You needs to produce calories in some form.
Let's talk about the way in which the West uses the IMF and World Bank to create economic crises and famine. Specifically, let's talk about Somalia. The playbook is basically this:
1. A country borrows money for some project. There's often corruption involved here (as the leaders siphon off work to make themselves rich);
2. The IMF imposes conditions on those loans. These includes financializing the food supply. Typically, what might've been a self-sufficient agricultural sector tends to get banned from producing food for themselves. Instead they have to produce export crops and buy food from, surprise surprise, Western nations. This tends to lead to a drop in food prices that means farmers can no longer support themselves. They then often become destitute and move to cities to find work;
3. If the loan is for an infrastructure project, it's usually Western companies doing it so the US is funding the IMF to give money to Western companies, basically;
4. As inevitably happens, the currency ends up tanking. The foreign food that decimated local production is now much more expensive in local terms. The government's ability to service the debt also gets savaged;
5. The IMF steps in with "structural programs" (including those like the financialization of agriculture) to take money out of the government to service IMF debt, which has similar devastating effects "austerity" measures do in Western countries;
6. The country is now trapped in debt, so much so that some call this "debt colonialism".
This has happened to Haiti and other countries.
The point is that Western interference most often comes with destroying agricultural self-sufficiency, creating famine.
All famines are caused by natural disasters. What makes them political is that people die when their ability to overcome natural disasters is restricted or removed.
E.g. for the Irish Famine, the natural disaster was the outbreak of the phytophthora infestans disease affecting potato crops - the outbreak spread from North America across Europe, affecting Belgium, Netherlands, France & the UK. The cause of death in Ireland was the English exporting all food produced in Ireland that wasn't potatoes. An interestingly relevant historical record here is the Australian Convict Collection showing the number of Irish convicts sent to Australia & Tasmania for stealing food during the famine years.
So far, if it's lasted long enough to be considered a famine, it's political. Yes, there's temporary and severe interruptions due to natural disasters, but if the political will is there, resources would be able to arrive anywhere in the world in the matter of days.
Modern famines, sure. But I think that's a relatively recent development. It also isn't guaranteed. A sufficiently large volcanic eruption could severely impact agriculture the world over.
> Catholic church that pushed people to reproduce without limits
[Citation needed]
It's hard not to interpret this as just garden variety bigotry, of the same sort that caused the famine in the first place.
Let's assume it's correct, though. The Catholic church had been one of the most powerful organisations in Europe for well over 1000 years by the time if the famine. Why did it take until Ireland in the 19th century for their population mismanagement to become truly problematic? Also why did this not also happen in a country like Spain? Hard to find many more enthusiastically Catholic countries than Spain in that time period.
The population density of Ireland at the time of the famine was comparable to England (it is now much lower). Ireland produced enough food to feed itself and millions of people in English cities at the time of the famine. The issue was not a lack of food but the "ownership" of the food.
The account of capitalism emerging from the black death is a fine theory for continental Europe. At the time of the black death, Irish society was controlled by Irish people. After the 1600s it was increasingly run as a colony, with the indigenous culture outlawed and intensive resource extraction for export to England (timber, food, etc).
You might as well ask why industrialisation didn't take off among the Choctaw or the Cherokee. Or maybe they also just have the wrong religion?
Easy peasy, famines were commonplace in Spain during the Middle Ages (not sure how about part of it that was controlled by the Muslims though, but i don't think it was much different). During the Middle Ages, famines (and epidemics) were the natural regulator of population and were seen as a normal thing. By the XIX century of course, things were very different....
In Spain at the period, there were no famines because people kept emigrating to the colonies. Ireland was itself a colony. That's the difference. In Eastern Europe where countries didn't have colonies, famines were a norm.
Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming that for the time being, provided plenty of food allowing population to build up. Then it backfired.
As for local populations pre-existing in the colonies, sure they almost all died out. To a much larger proportion than the Irish, and sometimes, went entirely extinct. That is the normal part of absorbing new lands. It's just that Ireland was Christian almost since Christianity became a thing, and was never "discovered", that made it special. But we shouldn't pretend like it wasn't normal or in any way exceptional overall. Genocide is a natural way in which nations interact.
> Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming
There was no overpopulation problem in Ireland! It was _less_ dense than England, while having similar climate and agricultural capacity. The reason for the famine was that the food that was abundantly produced in Ireland was transferred to England to support their cities (which did have an overpopulation problem). There was more than enough food produced in Ireland to feed everyone in Ireland. That is not what overpopulation looks like.
It's also easy to say no major famines happened in Spain because of her colonies, except that by the time of the famine she had very few remaining. Spanish people had the same capacity to emigrate to the Americas as the Irish did. Your argument was that Irish people were too Catholic to control their population but you haven't addressed the fact that that wasn't a problem in any of the other Catholic countries. The same should be true of Italy, who didn't even have a former empire to call on.
That does not indicate that it's thought to be a quote, [Citation Needed] indicates that it needs a supporting source to validate the statement. It is commonly used on Wikipedia to denote statements on a page that do not have proper supporting information, and should therefore not be uncritically accepted.
> That does not indicate that it's thought to be a quote
So you are indicating that a summons is necessary? That makes even less sense...
> [Citation Needed] indicates that it needs a supporting source to validate the statement.
But, logically, the person making the comment is the supporting source. That is, after all, why you are taking time to speak to them instead of some other source. If you find another source is more valid to what you seek, why not go directly to it instead? A middleman offers nothing of value.
> It is commonly used on Wikipedia to denote statements on a page that do not have proper supporting information
Sure. The entire purpose of Wikipedia is to aggregate information about topics from external sources. Citations are needed. It would not serve its intended purpose without them. But a wiki is quite unlike a discussion forum. A discussion forum is a venue to speak with the primary source...
...which is what ended up happening anyway, making the "[Citation Needed]" of any interpretation even stranger.
I'd have offered you a citation, but repeating what someone else said seems rather silly.
> Since gaining its catchphrase status, "citation needed" has been used in online discussion forums to humorously point out biased or baseless statements made by others.
So what you are saying is that someone thought could be funny by posting a tired meme? That may be true, but still doesn't make sense.
The original post was arguing that there were too many Irish people in Ireland because of the predominant religion. The implication, as I surmise, is that Catholics believe that only those who are constantly reproducing can be real BFFs with Jesus in the afterlife. Also, Catholics are seemingly too stupid to realize that Ireland is incapable of supporting more than 5-6 million people (apparently?) and therefore their mortal sex-cult doomed them and they have absolutely nobody to blame but themselves for a million people dying of starvation. The fools!
This is, at best, very fucking stupid. At worst, it is fairly bigoted and more than a little bit offensive. It is in the same category of Victorian pseudo-science that gave us phrenology and eugenics.
"[Citation needed]" was merely meant as a shorter and much more polite way of implying all of the above. I can be much less polite if that's something you're interested in.
I've never met an Irish person that "blames" the modern English for what our ancestors did. I might be talking out of turn, but I think they mainly just want us to acknowledge what happened and not downplay what the British did.
I met plenty when I lived there and plenty in the UK too.
Even while trying to acknowledge the sins of our past and sympathise with them (in all honesty), they still treated me like crap for who I am and where I'm from. That's just xenophobia
Ireland is full of resilient people who fought and bombed their way to their own freedom from the British. I think they will overtake the British economy before 2825
The Irish economy overtook the British one by most measures some time ago (arguably partially as a result of the UK’s problems with regional development; the British economy, at this point, is verging on basically just being London and its immediate area).
Yes, the Irish economy is bigger than the British, all you have to do to get that answer is: count all the revenue of famous Irish corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel (and others) as Irish revenue, and divide by the respective populations (6M and 70M).
Definitely do not think any further about these measures, just report them as Ireland ^ and UK v.
Yes, GDP figures for Ireland and other small open economies (and, for that matter, _London_, which has the same sort of dynamic) are pretty useless; this is fairly well-known. However, Irish average wages overtook UK ones after the financial crisis, concrete economic activity is generally higher (for instance, Ireland builds about 2.5x the number of housing units per capita per year), the Irish state pension is higher, Irish unemployment is lower, Irish inflation is much lower, and so on.
And it’s much starker when you compare Ireland to Northern Ireland (the bit of Ireland that the UK still runs), or, really, to the North of England or most other UK regions (again, really, the whole UK economy hangs off the south-east). The idea that Ireland would be _better off in 2025_ if it had stayed part of the UK is… pretty out-there, to be honest. The UK is simply very bad at regional development.
Ireland _was_ an economic basketcase for a very long time, but then, realistically, so was most of the UK; more or less since WW2 the UK outside of London and the south-east has been looking pretty unhealthy.
You’d expect that, though; the Greater Dublin Area isn’t far off half the population. And most of the GDP-skewing activity is in Dublin; Irish GDP numbers in general just aren’t very useful. You don’t see the same gap in wages and standard of living between Dublin and the west that you see between, say, London and Wales, though.
Yeah I agree. I don't know why the Brits insisted on cruelty to that magnitude in every place they ruled. I mean yes historically it was common, but they continued it way later into history than most peoples did, or perhaps it's my naivety.
The use of official wording to describe a crime against humanity against the Irish (speaking as an Irish person) continues today. Almost every western news media has used official speaking language to under-report the situation in Gaza or to excuse Israeli crimes against humanity. Consider this report [1], where Israeli children get emotions, and Palestinian children are "found dead" with no culprit or explanation for how that might have happened. This has happened repeatedly throughout Israel's genocide on the Palestinian people (lots of examples at [2]), and the same things are now being used to underplay Trump/America's attacks on migrants and trans people.
I think JetSetWilly's opinion is not the normal in England, at least around people my age.
I was always taught what a lot of people here say, that the potato blight was a natural disaster, but the British government took it as an "opportunity" and purposely did not do enough to help.
In my personal opinion, I think that few people would have died if the British government stepped up, not the many millions that died as a result of their inaction. As an English person, I'm not proud of what our government did to Ireland over the years. Ireland is a beautiful country with great people, and it took a long time even to get the relationship between the UK and Ireland to where it is now.
A crazy fact is that a higher percentage of Irish died in the Great Famine (well over 10% of the population) than in the Bengal famine in India in 1943 (about 3.5%).
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.”
Maybe a closer comparison would be famine of 1876-8, where some estimate go as high as 8.6M fatalities on a population of ~58M.
> 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' ...
>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
Indeed, and ironically, from people who have largely inherited their wealth instead of working for it.
[flagged]
That would be an odd thing for him to think, given the alleged emerald mine was claimed to be in Zambia which was never apartheid.
Ignorant opinion. The mine was in Zambia and had incredibly low output. There was no fortune made there.
They’re many legitimate things to criticize about Musk. No need to cook up BS stories.
Low compared to what? How much is low?
According to Errol Musk (Elon's father):
Elon Musk's Dad tells BI about the family's insanely casual attitude to wealth~ https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-abou...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errol_MuskOne 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.
No one disputes that Errol Musk had money (including Elon himself), but, as the link illustrates, it was from an engineering business and not from apartheid mines as implied by the OP.
As the first link states:
Errol Musk had multiple lines of income, including NSRs from three emerald mines that made a return.[dead]
Dependence on assistantialism is a real phenomenon. Here in Colombia (and probably all over the developing world?) it has been well proven that permanent help does create complacency and dependency. Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline.
1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding
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:
The narrative that colonizers shouldn't "assist" the victims of a famine when the colonizers were the ones driving down food production and exporting grain is so mind-bogglingly backwards. This is only a step away from an arsonist setting fire to your house and preventing the fire department from responding because that would only teach you to become dependent on the state bailing you out of every crisis.Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...
"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.
> Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years
Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
> Doing what?
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.
On the topic of the colonization of India, "Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India" is an illustrative book - especially if you want more context to draw conclusions about the scale of wealth taken from India.
So british has nothing to do with the famine ?
The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
> So british has nothing to do with the famine ?
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.
The argument wouldn't be that the famines occurred due to british mismanagement, but rather due to british management. A country produces a certain amount of food during times of plenty. If they are careful, they will stow away some of that excess food for times of hardship. If they are being "managed" by a foreign power for its own benefit, this excess will instead be shuttled away to generate income. During times of hardship, there will be no excess to feed on and people will starve. The foreign power, in turn, will be nowhere to be found. This is no accident or failure, but rather the colony being run as intended: for profit, not for the benefit of the people living there.
There was also a high level of extreme poverty in India for many decades after independence. Maybe not large scale famines, but people being constantly very badly malnourished.
It also coincides with the end of WWII and thus the end of the Japanese naval threat, which was a factor in the last Bengal famine.
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.
The British did plunder INCREDIBLE resource wealth from India, and various African countries, and the Americas prior to the revolutionary war, and the Carribean, and some South American countries too. And they weren't alone: Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and more, all colonizer nations, all held colonies, all of which generated revenue which was returned to/made in the home country. Like come on.
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.
There was obviously value extraction taking place in these areas. The question is if this extraction had meaningful impacts on the trajectory of the imperialists or that of their subjects. Decolonialists would have you believe that Britain would not have industrialized had it not been for materials they "stole" from India, Africa, and the Americas.
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.
> Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Textile manufacturing is an interesting example because some large companies do sign up to anti sweatshop rules. Back in the day Gap got pressured into doing that I believe. Here in UK, last I heard (may not be up to date) Marks and Spencer does that, and apparently so do Primark (cheap clothes store who many might assume use sweatshops), while large supermarket Tesco I've heard associated with using sweatshops and being unresponsive when people complained. I'd argue we the western consumer are responsible to a certain extent. We can do research and find out who's best to shop with and direct our spending accordingly, thus impacting the lives of people in those countries.
> Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India?
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.
> And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE."
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.
Is that because of the structure of the assistance?
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?
> it has been well proven that permanent help does create complacency and dependency
Surely there are proofs, then? And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks or "it is known" pseudo-common sense.
> And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks
If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?
For either, if the papers don't stand up to peer review and meta-analysis then yes, we should ignore them. Don't often see papers from think tanks engaging in actual science though....
We should ignore fact-free white paper from left-leaning think tanks, as well. We should accept scientific studies with a clear protocol, regardless of the institution. That is the bare minimum and then, those studies can be refuted or not depending on several factors.
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.
You have to be willing to entertain evidence from biased sources when you’re considering politically charged questions. By all means, consult evidence from various ideologies, but don’t hold out for unbiased scholarship that will never exist.
“Does welfare make people less productive” is not a political question. We can measure welfare and we can measure many aspects of productivity and activity. We can make a quantitative answer to that question. Opinion and ideology is not evidence.
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.
No one without some sort of ideological bias is going to do a serious study to address the question. That’s my point.
[dead]
Where was this proven in Colombia?
What medieval gibberish is this? I have installed a ton of robots in my time- and they put a ton of people permanently and forever out of work. It just evaporates - and does not return.
So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?
It's been proven in the developed world too.
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.
This also ostensibly occurred in New York in the 1970s, but the key thing to understand is that there is a significant historiographical tradition which views the Irish famine as a negligent (or intentional) genocide on the part of the British.
The main problem seems to be setting the backup payment below the rate necessary to sustain life.
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.
It's a deep and complicated part of history, but I think calling out a single main problem really risks skipping over the depth and scale of the problems.
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.
Your web site is down. You're losing $BIGNUM every hour. Someone says, we can work around it if we do this hack in this bit of code. But someone else says, we shouldn't do that, it will add technical debt and make more work for us later on down the line. We need to take our time and do it right.
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.
The problem is it compares humans to wild animals. If you feed wild animals they'll see you as a food source and often expect you'll continue to feed them forever.
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?
That kind of justification is absolutely what gets people to experiment with working people to death who are dying of starvation.
"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!"
What a steaming crock of shit.
The far bigger problem is creating entitled masters, not entitled slaves.
From people who want to take us back to feudalism.
and that keep succeeding in those attempts
The generic term is: perverse incentive.
Because it’s true. Aid makes governments less accountable to their people and more accountable to donors.
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..
If you're mentioning Haiti, it's only fair to add that they were saddled with a crippling debt to France (later to the US - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt) from the very beginning of their existence, and many of their current problems can be traced back to that. It's important to see both sides, especially now that it's clear how corrosive this narrative is if you're looking at Musk's attitude toward USAID...
We’re likely in agreement. What Haiti needs is investment in domestic industries to be competitive in a capitalist world.
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.
I cannot imagine a way out of this, the way you put it. Not giving any aid today means condemning masses to death. Giving some aid today means feeding the masses and maintaining the corruption. The foreign donors cannot condition the aid, or they theoretically could but have zero leverage for actually following up, because see above - they could only stop it, which nobody wants. I'm aware that it's common to blame the foreign forces for any bad situation, but again, I see zero ways to change the status quo just by modulating the foreign aid. Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?
This is one of the aims behind Fair Trade. Its giving a fair price to local producers for products, which means you can help people without running into issues of perverse incentives, dependency, lack of self-determination. That's the theory at least... For items not easily produced in the west e:g tea, coffee, chocolate, bananas, we try wherever possible to buy Fair Trade.
> Not giving any aid today means condemning masses to death.
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.
"it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals." - I agree with that but, to me that isn't an argument against providing targeted, life-saving aid to those in a terrible situation, whilst try to be mindful that the locals should be listened to and often in charge of it, and that aid can have negative effects if done badly. To give an example, I'm sure no-one in a disaster zone worries about arrogance when they see a doctor arrive from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). But hopefully MSF once they've dealt with the initial problem, are trying to help locals train up in medical techniques that they themselves want and work in the local environment. From what I've seen, I believe they do just that.. probably not always perfectly.
I think maybe there's an important different ethical and practical situation with genuinely foreign aid (rich countries sending resources to poor countries which have their own government, systems, regulations etc) vs a colonizing power that's effectively already in control of the area in which they helped form the crisis. The British were exporting food from Ireland and India in both of those crises. British land speculators bought Irish land and raised the rents and evicted farmers -- i.e. people already engaged in producing food were forced to stop.
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.
True, I was referring to the modern context of aid, not colonial times with extractive economies.
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.
> it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid
"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.
It's one of those things that is generally true but should not be the only consideration.
A bit of dependence that would need reducing later is a very small price to pay to avoid a million starved.
There were other methods that could have prevented starvation: the British could have closed Irish ports for export, so that the food raised in Ireland stayed there to feed the Irish. Instead, the British continued exporting food from Ireland. They could also have forbidden the distillation of grain (a potential food source) into whiskey, but they didn't, although some distilleries shut down as depopulation led to lower demand.
Having now checked the wikipedia page, that doesn't seem like it would have made a particularly big difference. The imports dwarfed the exports, particularly during 1847 when they were 8x larger.
Maybe Singapore?
They deliberately never accepted help from outside for that exact reason. It worked for them.
> On the international stage, if you have to put your hand out for assistance, it means you have no say. It is a big advantage for Singapore not to have to beg for aid. We have no need for assistance or loans that will subject us to external pressure. We are not dependent on any single external partner. And perhaps even more importantly, and you have just heard Minister Ng’s speech earlier, we do not depend on any external country to defend Singapore. We have the capability and the will to defend ourselves.
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.
The difference is that both Singapore and the EU did, or start doing, things by themselves. Just blaming the US for their misdeeds might feel good but does exactly nothing to help the bullied further.
Agreed. Other countries should follow the same path instead of depending on foreign aid to solve their issues.
Addicted to basic survival huh. Can't have that.
Was Malthusianism in vogue in the British government back then?
Very much so. Tim Pat Coogan covers this in his book "The Famine Plot" (which is one of the major proponents that the great hunger was a genocide and has received a lot of criticism, but which covers the basic facts in good detail).
[edit: somebody elsewhere in this comment section has (apparently seriously) proposed Malthusianism as the root cause. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. With all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. You can't keep a bad idea down]
Despite being a much liked figure in Ireland Tim Pat Coogan is not taken seriously as a historian by anyone here at all.
Except by your Secretary of State, who Schumer petitioned to get Coogan his visa for academic touring when it was strangely denied by the Dublin Embassy.
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'.
I'm aware that he has his detractors. I'm not a Coogan apologist! I'm just saying that the book covers the Malthusian angle well enough and it cites sources. The genocide angle is controversial to some but 90% of the book is straightforward fact.
I figured. Thanks.
This reminds me of Vladimir Lenin's claim that an important socialist principle is "He who does not work shall not eat" [0].
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_...
Yeah this reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
The sentiment goes back as far as the Bible:
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
That's very different from saying you shouldn't help people in a famine. Jesus also said, "blessed are the poor" full stop in Matthew. Also the KJV version is a pretty inaccurate translation and I don't know why people quote it in 2025 when there are translations that are both more accurate and more comprehensible.
> That's very different from saying you shouldn't help people in a famine.
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.
I think the point is there is a big difference between "He who does not work shall not eat" and "...anyone who was unwilling to work should not eat". Specifically the clause "unwilling to work".
As a socialist principle "who does not work" referred primarily to the bourgeoisie, i.e. who get money from capital gains, rents or inheritance as opposed to labor, although it did also mean that in early stages of socialism the communist principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their ability" is not feasible.
Nah not really, I grew up in communism/socialism and it was literally forbidden by laws to not have a work, that was ticket straight to jail.
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.
> Maybe a closer comparison would be famine of 1876-8, where some estimate go as high as 8.6M fatalities on a population of ~58M.
Uh, this is the Bengal famine the parent comment refers to, right? Ireland has never had 58M people in it.
Uh, no, the parent comment explicitly said the Bengal famine of 1943, which had up to 3.8M deaths
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...
Sounds like an attempt at genocide. Something that has led to billions in reparations for some groups but not the Irish.
The Irish famine is roughly comparable to other famines of the 19th century in terms of its mortality rate (i.e. Mysore in the 1870s). A true comparison is difficult since there were not accurate census figures in most famine prone regions but the rate is comparable (Ireland is on the high side but it was still comparable within the margin of error). What is unique about the Irish famine is that modern day Ireland’s population is still about 25% lower now than it was in the eve of the famine 180 years ago. I can’t think of any other place that depopulated like that.
> The Irish famine is roughly comparable to other famines of the 19th century in terms of its mortality rate (i.e. Mysore in the 1870s)
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> they were largely responsible for explicitly refusing to help and making the situation worse.
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.
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.”
So, when you say "they" you mean the Protestant Irish ruling class?
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.
> Downside of being the local (or global) power; everything is your fault.
Yes, that's generally how power works.
So the British Empire was color-blind in its viciousness, after all?
No, they had a lot of propaganda that showed the Irish as sub human, look at punch magazine for example
The Irish were not "white" back then
Stupid and lazy analysis.... they were not English. The French and the Germans were also not English. Nothing to do with racism it was nationalism.
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.
Sure, but I wouldn't naively believe that it's just the British that are/were like this.
I don't believe they implied that at all.
Well it's easy to assume, so it's best to clarify.
I was being sarcastic about how even-handedly the British dispensed their cruelty, to white Irish or Boer just as readily as to brown Bengalis.
Mortality rate doesn’t paint a full picture of the effect on Ireland. Emigration had a huge effect on the depopulation too. (I don’t think you deliberately left this out or anything just wanted to provide additional context).
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.
Its pretty close to the Holdomor in all attributes?
A somewhat related side-note (might be interesting): William Dalrymple recently talked about - "How in India the Irish Transformed from Colonised to Colonisers" - https://nitter.net/DalrympleWill/status/1898036558898585768 - and not quite/always the benevolent/sympathetic ones.
Besides we still call these events "famines"? Interesting. I thought genocide would be the word, isn't it?
> "How in India the Irish Transformed from Colonised to Colonisers"
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.
It's wild how the same empire could produce such different outcomes
Famines, blockades & sanctions on basic goods were the WMD of the colonial age. All the latecomer nations raced to get out from under this boot and become empires - and became the same sort of monster or worser.
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.
> Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.
Let's not forget Norman Borlaug
Great man, on whose shoulders many dwarfs have postured, about having brought peace by self-posturing and self-producing. We talked ourselves into having changed and being better than our predecessors, while eating their meals. We got drunk with ourselves on their grapes.
Famine? Only one crop failed. Ireland was a net exporter of food to the UK..
There’s another word for this, not a famine…
You are correct, food was exported outside of Ireland during this time period. This time was called the Hungry 40's and crop failures were happening all over Europe. It lead to the Revolutions of 1848. Food was only available at prices that the poor could no longer afford.
> Food was only available at prices that the poor could no longer afford.
> 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.
Unfortunately the Revolutions of 1848 were violently suppressed. The forces of order were able to exploit the differences between the political reformers and the social reformers.
It still resulted in significant reforms in the end, even in Austria-Hungary, removing a lot of religion based persecution there for example.
Pretty sure donors line their pockets a lot more than the voting poor.
So like housing today. Future will not judge monetization of basic needs kindly.
I lived in a country where housing was provided for free (the Soviet Union), but monetization is so far superior—you wouldn’t believe the difference.
Nice myth. Food wasn't quite provided for free. You did not get quite even basic rations enough to survive even if you were able to get them, further, due to mass exodus from farming to city, buildings were built there, and you had to wait a really long time, sometimes forever, to get a living space by lot. Similar with a car - it all operated under severe scarcity. All countries involved, even East Germany, had these problems.
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".
Why the downvotes? This is correct
I didn't vote but I guess the downvotes are because it calls the parent claim a "myth" and then goes on to agree with it.
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.
The problem is not monetization of basic needs, the problem is putting the controlling interest in the hands of a few who do not care about the lives of the many.
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.
>That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
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.
I'm not sure if you are mocking the absurdity of the false communist narrative or just repeating it uncritically.
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.
>In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes
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.
Umm... how do you think modern farming works exactly?
With a wild amounts of gov't subsidies. (Note: All highly advanced nations do it in slightly different ways.)
Sounds like you are trying to explain away over a million deaths as if it was happening everywhere in Europe and not primarily the British fault.
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.
The way this comment is written reads suspiciously like ChatGPT. And the name of the user has bot in it...
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.
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I see why others flagged you although I wouldn’t.
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...
There was no real market competition within Ireland. All the farms were owned by an elite mostly British class living in England which was a direct hold over from Feudalism. Regular Irish could only pay rent to this group to farm themselves. Import/exports were controlled by the British shipping and enforced by the military when locals resisted, all in direct coordination with the small amount of landowners. Particularly difficult situation on an island. It was extractive colonialism without a strong equal rule of law or self representation. Calling it laissez faire was just a cover to benefit the British.
> All the farms were owned by an elite mostly British class living in England which was a direct hold over from Feudalism.
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
The “Protestant Ascendency” are not Irish, even if they technically lived and were born on the island.
Some Irish Protestants were descendants of recent immigrants from Britain, others were descendants of Irish converts from Catholicism.
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.
Wolfe Tone was a member of the Protestant Ascendancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfe_Tone
Private charity from England and others did send a lot of money to Ireland during the famine(s).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Relief_Association
There may have been individuals within the British citizenry who independently did the best moral actions they could in the circumstances, but there's documented evidence that the political body at large and their leadership at best did not care an iota for an any and all deaths in the Irish due to the consequences of their leadership, or at worst actively hoped and planned for the deaths to remove an inconvenient people.
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Archive link - https://web.archive.org/web/20250114101154/https://ireland-c...
The word for it is a man-made famine, much like the Holodomor was a man-made famine.
Mass Murder
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Ireland produced plenty of good. The Irish could have supported themselves without the British demanding the Irish export food instead of eating it.
Ireland being left to fend for themselves, without exporting to Britain, would’ve also solved the problem.
By now, Ireland has a higher GDP per capita than the UK, and has had it for last couple of decades.
I’m not sure being a tax haven for multinationals by giving them sweetheart deals when the intentional loopholes don’t suffice is really indicative of a robust economy.
As long as it serves the local population (and apparently it does), I don't see why it's a wrong thing to. Ireland is not just a paper-holding tax haven; it has huge factories and engineering offices of large and successful corporations, again, employing local folks. I don't see how it might make its economy frail.
Huh, weird - two genocides caused by the brits, only 100 years apart.
The other one being the Australian Aboriginal population?
Bengal famine.
Or Persian famine of 1917–1919, or Iranian famine of 1942–1943. Both of which the west downplays.
Japan had nothing to do with the Bengal famine at all.
“Caused by the brits”
Where are you getting japan from?
Japan was in the process of burning it's way through Burma, which is before that time was a massive producer of rice. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-26937-2_...) South-east asia suddenly lost something like 5 million tonnes of rice production in the space of two years.
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.
I went to school in the UK. Unsurprisingly, I don't think the Irish or Bengal famines were mentioned. In fact the whole British imperial project was largely glossed over. But lots of coverge of the Romans, Vikings, Normans, the black death and the two World Wars.
The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Spanish also did horrible things during their colonial periods. Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.
> In fact the whole British imperial project was largely glossed over. But lots of coverge of the Romans, Vikings, Normans, the black death and the two World Wars.
I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought. So they choose to not teach it. This leads British institutions today to have a serious colonial hangover whether they know it or not. The operating paradigm is still an outdated one in many cases.
They teach students what they think made Britain great -- the Romans, the Norman invasion, the World Wars, Churchill etc. -- while actually glossing over what made them great: Empire. It really brings to mind a line from the Thor: Ragnarok movie - "Proud to have it; ashamed of how they got it". The British people today might not have an idea of their Empire but the effects still linger on in their former colonies.
> I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought.
I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.
Two world wars, and slavery is pretty much all we were taught, unless you specialised.
"modern" immigration was/is much more driven by our former membership of the EU than empire.
Empire is why our friends had Caribbean grandparents. WWII for polish grandparents, and Idi Amin why they also might have had indian parents born in Uganda.
But they were all pretty British to us. They sounded like us, dressed the same.
"modern" immigration when I was growing up was mostly Portuguese and Polish, later more baltics when that opened up to schengen.
But those later countries were also a product of another empire: USSR.
> I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.
Millenial here from the US. I was taught about the British Empire, extensively, in both high school and college. My high school teacher played "Rule, Britannia" (lyrics include "rule the waves") for us to hammer home the point.
Maybe you meant no millennial in Britain?
Not a universal experience though: also a US Millennial, in middle school/highschool our history classes were pretty much only US history, and only touched world history as GP described. We did have a world history elective in highschool though, but it was an advanced placement class and not everyone could take it. No history classes during college.
Additionally my history classes all ended around the 60s-70s - roughly when the teachers were kids. Seemingly from their perspective "history" didn't include anything they experienced.
Sorry, yes, I should have been more specific
>>the effects still linger on in their former colonies.
The rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the English language, ending Sati etc.
The empire wasn't all good, but was more benevolent than a lot of colonial empires. See the work of Nigel Biggar for reference.
and of course generational poverty
You mean that didn't exist in India before the British? Or it is a British thing that we imported to India?
Not the parent, but:
Neither. While colonialism didn't _create_ generational poverty, the systemic genocides of the British were new. Colonial policy of prioritizing exports directly led to the deaths of millions. That's a fact.
A similar comparison would be between Roman slavery and the chattel slavery of the Americas. They are both abhorrent practices (just like the genocides caused by Indian rulers in the pre-British period), but it pales in comparison to the scale and horror of antebellum slavery.
Well, if this is not mentioned at all during history classes, at least it prevents them from being taught that "British brought prosperity and development to all of its colonies, making the world better for everyone" and "they should be thankful that we went there and did all those things, how nice of us, and how rude of them not to thank us again and again!".
>"they should be thankful that we went there and did all those things, how nice of us"
I think that is a tacit assumption that a lot of British people make.
I think it comes from the general belief that poverty is bad and a simplistic view of cause and effect. "Before the Empire they were really poor, with high mortality, after the empire they were much wealthier with lower mortality".
It's just going to be the default view if one does not have further information.
I went to school in Scotland 65-78 and it was mentioned, studied extensively, as was British colonialism and the post war independence movement. Perhaps Scots education ran to a different agenda to the English one.
(the Scots diaspora as a result of Land clearances, and the Irish independence struggle and its links (and opposition) to Scots Protestantism and Irish migration to the mainland might have driven this. We have both Irish independence fights at football matches and orange order parades)
My experience in America is largely one of the following:
American person on social media (and, yes, I would claim HN is social media) claims "They never taught us this in school!!!" with many agreeing emphatically.
... and 90+% of the time I remember specifically being taught it. Most people don't remember much of their educations.
In the US there are large regional differences in what is taught, especially when it comes to history topics. So some of the difference might be that your state had a more comprehensive approach to history than the commenters' states.
But yes, most people have a really bad memory of what's taught in school (and that probably isn't entirely their fault, the system clearly doesn't lead to sticky knowledge).
It isn't just state differences either, because schools are mostly funded by property taxes, areas that serve a more expensive area of properties receives way more funding. While an area that serves all cheap property gets dog shit in funding. The area I grew up in was mostly farms but had one lake that was way overly priced compared to everywhere else, a new development of cookie cutter houses but they were 4-5 times the price of other property around. And the school there was excellent, and had I not ever moved I would of assumed that was the standard public education quality level. But I moved schools in highschool to another mostly rural school 2 hours away, but they didn't have the new development well-off lake community, and despite being in the same state, the poorer school was literally 3-4 years behind in education and had a third of the material supplies and teachers were paid significantly less and thus were mostly of far lower quality. So that my senior year in the poorer school was essentially having what I learned in 8th and 9ths grade repeated to me my senior year, but of course for the locals that was the first time many of them heard those things.
> areas that serve a more expensive area of properties receives way more funding.
This actually isn't true in general. Baltimore (poor city) city schools, eg, spend twice as much as Carmel Indiana (wealthy city) does per pupil.
The link between education outcomes and spend is extremely weak.
They didn't teach this in high school!!!
My ex who loved history had to learn about it all on her own because she just got civil war history over and over and over. She wasn't even in the proper South. Though I'd get punched for saying that anywhere anyone could here.
Agreed - I was shocked to discover NY State curriculum has nothing about Native Peoples. I mean, the five nations were influential on early colonial life.
The scots educational curriculum is sufficiently different to the English that I had significant difficulty at (an English) University, because of assumptions about what was learned.
Also, time changes things. I did school during a period where school history was in ferment and the teacher said at some points we were learning a new curriculum which rejected "great men of history" theory and focussed on mass movements. I suspect after Thatcher this was revised, it was almost overtly marxist. The textbooks on post colonialism were pretty clear.
I hasten to add I had no problem with this, and I read "the 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte" as revision for the history exam in the library, with much pleasure. This was because we'd done a lot on the revolutions across Europe in 1848. Strangely we did very little on Chartism. When I went to uni I found out this was a really active field of study, especially in the midlands because so many Chartist pamphlets are held by places like Leeds university, the working class towns. Maybe thats why Scots History ignored it: it was a south of the border story! If they'd done the emergence of the British Labour party I bet we'd have had a lot given the origins of Labour in Scotland, and the Red Clyde story. That was probably done in year 12 and I left school early to go work in a Marine Biology lab.
I probably remember this because I enjoyed it. A lot of history doesn't excite everyone, perhaps I was lucky. I am buggered if I can remember the Maths, which isn't very helpful given I work in CS. Like Arnold Rimmer in "Red Dwarf" I am acceptably meh at colouring in the crinkly bits in Geography but not much else.
British Empire has on the UK National Curriculum since 1988 and was taught in history classes before the introduction of the National Curriculum. This is conveniently forgotten by people looking to make a point. My impression is that a certain type of Brit likes to play this "I'm one of the good ones" role where they admonish their compatriots' ignorance as a strange virtue signal. It involves collecting damning factoids about the worst aspects of of empire (bengal, irish conflicts, slavery etc) with little interest in the subject as a whole.
I don't think this is the case here. The English and Scottish curricula (and, I imagine, those of Wales and NI) are different. Most aspects of British colonialism are (were?) simply not taught in England unless you specifically chose that subject late in high school.
Looking back, it's also kind of amazing to think that the Northern Ireland Conflict was largely glossed over in English schools while it was going on, but the news coverage was pretty one-sided also.
This has also been my experience.
The Scots pretty much ran the British empire.
I'm probably younger than the other Belgian data point in this thread but when I went to high school in the late 2000's our colonial past, warts and all, was taught during history class. Down to the pictures of people with chopped off hands because they hadn't met quota.
I went to elementary school in Belgium from 1978-1982. I had the sense there was some national pride in having had a major African colony, but maybe Leopold II wasn't a benevolent ruler. Unlike Leopold I or Albert I, who were depicted quite heroically. I didn't learn quite how far from benevolent Leopold II really was until much later in life.
Belgian here. Now, it's been decades, but we did get a mention of our colonial past, with a cartoon of Leopold II as a snake constricting some African person. I don't think we got told what kind of atrocities we committed (and Belgian colonialism was really, really bad), but we do get told it was bad.
In Germany the colonial period is taught, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference and global maps. The German colonies are hardly mentioned, Germany lost them all 100 years ago, and I don't think many Germans could name the countries/regions even. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_Wars ("systematic extermination of native peoples") isn't taught.
The largest german colonial project was based on starving millions of people in Eastern Europe mostly Russians.
I did not hear about in school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
I wasn't aware of this exact plan either, but to the defense of my history teacher / curriculum:
It was made very clear that millions of civilians died (even when not counting the concentration camps) due to the war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg)
I guess it depends on the decade and the Bundesland.
In the 80s, the Wehrmacht was still presented as a morally decent army. That changed in the 90s, partly due to the Wehrmacht exhibition.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung
Non-German in Germany. I get the impression that everyone knows that one holocaust very shamefully, but not any of the other ones. Or the one that's happening right now. (In fact, I could get deported for this comment if the police had nothing better to do. Oh well.)
And in New Zealand they also didn't teach us about the way our ancestors holocausted the Māori.
Holocausts happen with alarming regularly in history, and the side doing one usually ends up winning, except, you know, that one time. I wish I understood what factors make people so unable to reason about them or even acknowledge them. Business as usual bias? Ego defense? I think the German teaching that there was only one and there will never be another falls under denial.
The way you can't talk about Palestine in Germany feels like the way you can't talk about Hacker News moderation on Hacker News, except, you know, the life and death of about 6 million Muslims are at stake.
In the Netherlands the colonial period is mentioned, but referred to as 'the Golden Century', and atrocities committed aren't really mentioned. There has been public debate about this in recent years, so this may have changed, and the debate in general, in addition to eg museums and documentaries paying attention to it, will probably have contributed to slightly more widespread knowledge about it. It's how I learned a bit about it.
I recently read "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" and it talks in some detail about the atrocities carried out by the Dutch in the spice islands. It isn't something I had been aware of before.
I also wasnt teached about this in school when I was a kid 3 decades afo. My history knowledge came selftaught from nul-tot-nu comics, where colonialism, slavery and holocaust definitly where touched upon. These so called `zwarte bladzijden` (black pages, doesnt translate nicely) are more common in education nowadays after lively debates the last decade(s).
Must be said the knowledge/interest of historical knowledge among my fellow Dutchies isn`t all that great.
https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/slavernij-en-kolonialism...
> figures from article above: percentages of total history subject matter: colonialism 9% Slavery 4 % Holocaust 2 %
Just to let you know, the past tense of teach is taught; so you would say "I wasn't taught this at school". Other than that, your English is great (better than some of my fellow English people lol). Well done.
You are right, and thanks. Typing on mobile with alternative keyboard without spelling correction is a challenge. I was fortunate enough to be on a part Dutch/English primary school. That helped a lot with getting a lot of assumptions corrected. For instance as a kid I assumed the English word for "monkey" is "ape", because the Dutch word is "aap".
>`zwarte bladzijden`
We have the same expression in Russian.
I heard sometime the best language to read Russian literature in (besides Russian) is Dutch, you know anything about this?
No, I haven't heard about that, but that's interesting.
Russia learned a lot from Dutch during Peter the Great's time, but I can't make a connection to literature from that.
Perhaps, just similar national characters?
Directness is definitly part of both national characters indeed.
I asked the toasters, they said this about it:
Yes, Russian literature tends to translate well into Dutch, and there are a few reasons for that:
1. Linguistic Similarities in Syntax and Tone – While Dutch and Russian are from different language families, both can handle long, complex sentences without losing clarity. Dutch, like Russian, allows for a mix of formal and informal tones within a single text, which helps maintain the nuance of Russian literature.
2. Cultural Compatibility – Dutch readers appreciate introspective, philosophical, and existential themes, which are common in Russian literature. Authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov resonate well with Dutch audiences because of their deep psychological exploration and social critique.
3. Strong Translation Tradition – The Netherlands has a long history of translating world literature with high quality. Dutch translators often work directly from Russian rather than relying on intermediary languages like English or French, preserving the original style and meaning.
4. Directness and Emotional Depth – Russian literature is known for its raw emotional depth and directness, qualities that align well with Dutch communication norms. This makes Russian novels feel more natural in Dutch than in some other languages that might soften or rephrase certain expressions.
Many Dutch readers have a strong appreciation for Russian classics, and some Dutch authors have even been influenced by them.
Hmm, is there some Dutch book you'd recommend to a Russian to read?
And Peter the great is just an amazing interesting chracter, must be said. I still intend to collect a beardtax coin one day.
Be careful, they are quite expensive and sometimes forged: https://www.m-dv.ru/catalog/id,6524/prohod.html
Empire is taught now, though the specific parts of it will depend on the school/teacher. Here's an example of the sort of teaching material that might be used: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zy4sg2p
I should have added the context that my secondary schooling was in the 70s and 80s.
This is a reminder why trying to be hip to sell a message is actually very often counterproductive. (See D.A.R.E.)
That Quentin Question video made me cringe from the beginning to the eventual end when I closed it for being insufferable.
Patronizing kids does not hold sway in the long term. They don't stay young. I think it's better to treat them more mature than they are, to speak to the people they become.
The tonal shifts in that video gave me whiplash. Please tell me they didn't give that treatment to the Holocaust as well.
That's KS2 material, so 7-11 year olds. They don't cover the Holocaust until they're older. Here's an example of KS3 material about the Holocaust. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zt48dp3
I definitely learned about the Irish Potato Famine when I did GCSE history in the UK (England) in the early 90s. I learned a lot about British colonial history too in my GCSE.
I did history GCSE as well in the mid 90s, and from what I can recall it was only 20th century history. I'm also pretty sure that the curriculum was split into several modules and the school got to pick something like 3 out of N modules to focus on.
> Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.
When I went to secondary school from about 1997-2001 Indonesia in particular was covered fairly extensively. From what I recall it wasn't white-washed either: I remember one chapter describing how a young Indonesian woman was punished with hot chilli pasta (sambal) on her vagina. Pretty graphic stuff to teach a 14-year old.
Experiences seem to differ though, because I've heard other people describe that it's barely covered and/or white-washed. Maybe it depends on the school? I don't know. Also the schooling system completely changed since then.
Based on the responses here, it seems to vary a lot between countries, within countries and over time.
Spain is still in complete denial. In fact, the national day is still Columbus day or as they call it, Día de la Hispanidad.
Columbus was a monster.
I don't think the Spanish address it at all. I lived there for a while and I remember visting a lot of glorious cathedrals and castles. Most of them were funded with gold looted from the Americas, but there was never any mention of it. And neither do the Spanish (or Portuguese) people seem to associate themselves with the historical empires those countries ruled.
Maybe because Spain and Portugal lost their empires earlier than Great-Britain?
In France this really depends, today, on the teacher.
When I was a kid in the 80s colonization was very lightly mentioned, mostly in the vontext of punitive comonies quch as Guyana.
Otherwise these territories were shown to children in mainland France as normal departments.
Today it is different. Colonies are part of the cirriculum but teachers have more leeway in appproching the topic. One of my children had the "we are genocide makers" version, when the other one was "colonization was a blessing for them" (I am overdrawing the picture)
In Italy the Eritrean and Ethiopian parts of our history are mentioned and nothing more, at least in the past.
There is a very good documentary about Italian war crimes which include the Ethiopian campaign, as well as the treatment of the Balkans by the Italian troops.
In the US, we covered a lot of old world colonial abuses in AP Euro and World History, but they are only briefly mentioned in regular courses. Irish and Armenian genocides were given special focus, probably mostly due to the demographics of the area I grew up in.
US and Eurocolonial treatment of the Native Americans was covered extensively in regular courses though, often alongside and explicitly compared to the Holocaust which is also covered extensively.
> Irish and Armenian genocides were given special focus, probably mostly due to the demographics of the area I grew up in.
There's just so much history to cover, and to be charitable to those who exclude events deemed important it can be that other events are deemed more important (especially by the local population) and there's only so much class time.
History instruction seems to be of two minds, either grand narratives (great men in the past, metrics-driven narratives like agricultural productivity now), or the case study approach where you sample some episodes from a variety of times and places and study each in depth. In both cases the approach must involve leaving some stories on the editing floor.
I'm curious, how old are you if I may ask? I'm 61, and of these things, only the Holocaust and the failure of the Soviet Union were covered.
Just to add some (unprovoked) additional info here: I'm a 26 year old Canadian. We covered early Canadian history, abuse of the aboriginal peoples of Canada, war with America, and WW1/WW2/the Holocaust.
I don't think we were really taught at all about European/Asian history or the Soviet Union. I think I could have taken some classes related to those in highschool (secondary school), but for anyone working towards a non-history bachelor's degree those courses were generally not something that you could fit in your timetable.
34.
Thanks. I should also note that my kids learned about those things in school.
I am 30. In all my schooltime history classes, we never covered any famine in India or the Global South. Only the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Irish Potato Famine, the Chinese famine, and maybe I'm forgetting a few. These are the main times famine showed up in our books. No discussion about Armenia, or any related such things. Population transfer policies of the USSR and China were discussed (and these are close to genocide). Native American extermination was obviously covered heavily. As was the role of slavery in American history up to the present day.
I believe there was also one in Africa committed by Belgium in the Congo? I remember seeing some photos of something cruel from there to this effect.
The Congo belonged personally to King Leopold of Belgian (not the Belgian state). His minions committed all sorts of atrocities, mainly in the pursuit of rubber. You can read about it online, but it is stomach churning stuff.
That's pretty recent. If you look at older US history school books, the physical and social genocide of the Native Americans is largely glossed over. It wasn't until after A People's History of the United States came out in the 80s that the school books slowly became more honest.
Not even mentioned? E.g. the great man-made famine of 1935 in the USSR is mentioned in the school history course in Russia. Post-Soviet, admittedly, but still closer in time by a century. To say nothing of the US school programs mentioning quite a bit of bad things that have been done by the Americans during the last couple of centuries.
What Americans don't learn about is that the famine we nearly triggered here during WWII was caused by seizing farms owned by Japanese Americans and then running them into the fucking ground. I've heard claims that the food rationing would have been totally unnecessary if not for that.
Most of them didn't get those farms back after the war either.
I'd learned about the internment camps from a human rights perspective, and the loss of family businesses, but I'm ashamed to admit I'd never learned about the economic impact until now.
I had to check the veracity of this, and it seems to be true. By 1945, Japanese American farms were responsible for 30%+ of the agricultural output of California.
I only heard about this a few years ago. About the fourth time I listened to someone talk about the camps. Which we did talk about during school but very briefly.
George Takei (yes, the guy off Star Trek) has talked in detail about his family's terrible experiences of internment during WWII.
I'm impressed with the level of debate in the answers. Thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me
Text (link) display is too truncated, so, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is a 1995 book..."
German curriculum is state and school difficulty level dependent to a degree, so what I say may not apply to Bavaria for example. I was taught quite extensively about the various German states with extra detail starting at the French revolution and very detailed Weimar and Third Reich.
Germany's role in colonialism was always limited compared to the other European powers. We were late to the game and lost them after WW1, so it was more of a footnote. It did mention our colonies in East Africa and South East Asia but only mentioned the genocide against the Herero without a mention of details. The Atlantic Slave and trade was covered in great detail both in history and English lessons. Same for the Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of South and Middle America.
> Unsurprisingly, I don't think the Irish or Bengal famines were mentioned. In fact the whole British imperial project was largely glossed over. But lots of coverge of the Romans, Vikings, Normans, the black death and the two World Wars.
I read a ton of Usborne and Dorling Kindersley books and these were exactly the sorts or subjects they fixated on. I suppose it's probably part of some long-established national curriculum.
Where I live, people often (conspiratorially) complain that more serious subjects were not covered in school, but the only things I can't ever really remember covering involved South-and-4th-of-July-American history. We didn't really cover Africa outside of the 20th century, either.
To be honest I think American schools are the only ones who really give colonial history the attention it deserves because it's the basis of their entire country and then goes on to fill out the comparatively boring eighty or so years between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II. I find most people I talk to from the UK who are aware of some aspect of colonial history are either apologists for the British Empire or have this imported view common in North American (and especially Canadian) universities that the British were this uniquely nefarious force of evil. I suppose the historically curious ones just spend their time studying the Norman conquests.
I don't think the British empire was "uniquely nefarious", but I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious! I'm not aware of many former colonies celebrating Colonisation Day or bemoaning the withdrawal of the British Army from their territories.
Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
> I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious!
The Maori were eating each other before the British arrived - that's not hyperbole, they practised cannibalism. Upper caste Indians were throwing still-living women into fires so they could join their husbands in the afterlife. If the British arrived in these places as marauding pirates (and they did), they still come out ahead on these metrics alone.
> Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
Ironically that is where some of the worst atrocities occurred.
The British Empire ended the hideous practice of Sati ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice) ). It also unified India and built the railroads. The Indians paid a very heavy price for this though. The East India compoany was rapacious. Before the British colonised India, it was one of the richest countries in the world. When it left, it was one of the poorest.
> Before the British colonised India, it was one of the richest countries in the world. When it left, it was one of the poorest.
I've never seen any convincing evidence that it was one of the richest countries in the world. What are you basing that off of?
It’s based on some of the same sources describing historical economies of other countries/regions. There are a variety of sources accessible online that go into more detail, including the ones cited in the excerpt I’ve included below.
> India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[12] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[13] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.[12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India
Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society. Per capita, there’s no indication India was ever the richest. They did fall behind massively due to an inability to compete during industrialization though. The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
> Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society.
It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.
> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
There is some information here about the British East India company pretty much destroyed the Indian textile industry through tarifs and other measures. Turning Indian from a leading textile manufacturer into a (much less profitable) producer of raw cotton for Britain's mills:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cotton
"In 1820, India's GDP was 16% of the global GDP. By 1870, it had fallen to 12%, and by 1947 to 4%." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...
It was also mostly already conquered by the Mughals.
IIRC it was discussed in the 'Empire' podcast by British historian William Dalrymple. But I might be misremembering that.
It isn't difficult to find examples of people misbehaving in the history of any country. That doesn't mean they are irredeemable and they need a British Army battalion to come and save them from themselves.
I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".
I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.
> I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites.
Interesting. What is this based on? When it comes to killings done by the British forces in India one of the most renowned, bloody and regrettable incidents in colonial history in India was the Massacre of Amritsar where British forces lost control and fired on a crowd of protesters. This resulted in around 400 deaths (many more injured). The reason this was such an infamous event is because of how uncharacteristic it was of British rule in India.
Like I said, it's a guess. I don't have firm numbers and I'm speculating. Aside from incidents like the one you described, I'm taking into account Wellington's military campaigns, which involved large-scale battles and entire kingdoms being conquered and subjugated. We are certainly talking about a death toll in the tens of thousands.
> Lost control
Dyer gave explicit orders to fire into the crowd.
That sounds like loosing control of a protest to me
They did not lose control of a protest. The Indians were not permitted to assemble. When it was discovered that an assembly was meeting, the British entered the square where the assembly occurred and massacred those present.
And many of those present were women and children.
Native Americans in the US also practised cannibalism. Evidence has been found in coprolites.
Who didn't eat other people?
Coming out of prion studies, laughing sickness, the Fore people in PNG, mad cow disease was a greater understanding of the defences everywhere in humans against prion related brain diseases .. these defences wouldn't exist if eating other humans wasn't relatively commonplace in human evolution.
In recorded European history we have "Corpse medicine" and eating bituminised mummies as a fad.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_cannibalism
I was surprised that I had never heard of this, but as I investigated further I found the citations were sparse. All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg. Here's an excerpt from the About section of his website:
> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.
You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
> All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg.
You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.
I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?
The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.
Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:
* https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1083320
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.300.5617.227a
are links to a paper (2003) and commentary that goes down that path looking at genetics.
The more troubling to some is recent history during which attitudes towards using body parts have changed, even in Europe.
Many accept evidence of cannibalism 1,000 years past in the Americas: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691637396/pr...
Some are uncomfortable about contempory reports of human flesh used in Asian medicines: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/chinese-made-infant-flesh-caps...
People can be forgiving of survival cannabilism in European famines (even in the 1930s) and among castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Europe
A number are just unaware that human bones were used to make beet sugar: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/skeletons-from-battle-of...
> You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
You're excused.
> You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.
The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?
> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.
I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.
There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.
[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345912
> The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper.
I never claimed that it did.
I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.
There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".
> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.
Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.
On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.
How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?
All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.
In France there are mentions of the colonies, slavery, and ensuing wars. And you study napoleon of course.
But there is never a critic of it, it's mentioned as matter of fact for the first, and only in positive for the second.
I had to grow old to realize "wait, napoleon was basically our hitler...".
Napoleon is certainly a complicated figure and his raw ambition caused death and misery for millions. I don't think he carried out any genocides though, did he? I see an accusation of genocide online ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_Crimes ), but it doesn't sound very credible.
Complicated doesn't begin to describe him! I think that, by our modern standards, I would be very unhappy to be a citizen of Napoleon's empire.
However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!
Indeed, he didn't commit genocide, but his wars ended up killing 3.5 to 6 millions people, a staggering amount for the time.
Given that those deaths were basically because of his lust for territorial extension and disregard for human life, I would say we are in a similar ballpark as Mao, Hitler, Stalin, etc.
Of course, our history books are quick to state he made reforms, particularly legal and administrative ones, that benefitted our country a lot and still echo benefits today.
But again, I think if you a responsible for millions of deaths because of your desire for conquest, any arguments you can make in the other way are instantly moot.
You may, however, made the argument that it would have been better to be a French citizen at the time than somewhere else, depending on where and how you were born. But it's a different point.
History classes are propaganda
So true. One of my better accomplishments as a parent is the BS detection skills of my kids. They’re respectful but make it clear when one of their teachers shift from facts to personal politics and bias. I’m always happy to answer emails from teachers with an agenda who get called on it by my kids.
Depends of the country, it can be done correctly. I also wish we taught historiography alongside history itself, it's an important part of building critical thinking.
> I went to school in the UK. Unsurprisingly, I don't think the Irish or Bengal famines were mentioned
There's a _lot_ of British history, and world history. There are several (5?) competing exam boards offering GCSEs and A Level's in history, and generally schools are free to choose between exam boards on a subject-by-subject basis. Each of these will offer an absolute multitude of historic periods, crises, etc, that again schools are free to choose from; history exam papers will offer students choices of questions depending on what they actually studied.
What you get taught in your history class at school in the UK is down to your school's Head of History, rather than a complex government-led conspiracy. If your school's Head of History wants to teach "Empire is Bad", they will have no trouble finding approved materials to do so!
https://archive.ph/JxMPq
I spent some times in Ireland and Northern Ireland recently. What the locals told me about the famine were:
- Most land were controlled by large land owners. Most peasants had very small farm land, which couldn't feed the people if normal crops were planted so they had to plant the higher yield potato to have enough food. When the disease wiped out the potato crop, most people went without any food.
- The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals.
- The ruling class consisted of large land owners and British transplants in the Northern Ireland after the conquering of Ireland by Britain could care less about the shortage of food. They actively hid the problem from the central government in Britain. The governor/duke/whoever tried to sweep the problem under the rug to avoid appearing as incompetent.
- When the central government in Britain learned of the famine, they acted too late and too little, unwilling to spend money to deal with the emergency. Britain at the time looked down on the Irish people in general.
This led to great animosity of the Irish people to Britain, driving the subsequent independent movements.
Fun fact, about 10% of the U.S. population are of Irish descent, due to massive immigration from Ireland in the following years after the famine.
Edit: Just looked up the Irish population in U.S., about 11%. https://uscanadainfo.com/irish-ancestry-in-america/
Another fun fact: useless buildings were commissioned as a form of charity to the starving poor under the guise of gainful employment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conolly%27s_Folly
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/irelands-famine-follie...
Blindboy did an interesting podcast on this:
https://shows.acast.com/blindboy/episodes/pineapplefolly
Buildings and roads yeah. Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then, this was the time of the New Poor Law (oft called the starvation act) and the workhouses.
Being poor was considered a major personal failing.
Yeah, it's definitely a change to the narrative for people outside of Ireland. The podcast opened my eyes to it, and also the Famine song by Sinead O'Connor
FTA (for anyone's benefit):
> In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.
> The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.
It would be darkly poetic if Brexit brought these same conditions to the UK as a whole if they had crop failures one year.
(To make it clear for the pedant literal crowd - I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor do I want it to happen. I'm simply commenting on how poetic it would be.)
> Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then
That particular peak is probably much older. Charity at a non-negligible scale to distant (meaning "not literally in visual range") people has been very rare throughout history.
Nope! I’m not going to claim it was great before, but Britain was actively regressing as the Whigs took control and followed the ideas of Malthus and Bentham. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (new poor law) was specifically design to check on and significantly downgrade the body of old poor law.
When the Irish crossed the Atlantic, looking for a better life, they travelled on what became known as "coffin ships". It was common for 20-30% of the passengers to die during transit, and sometimes reportedly up to 50%.
As an interesting factoid these sort of mortality figures were not especially uncommon in naval voyages until surprisingly recently. Scurvy is kind of a joke now a days, but it killed millions of people. It was such a big deal that vitamin c is literally named after it - ascorbic acid, or anti-scurvy acid. But that only happened on into the 20th century!
The idea that such a brutal disease could have been prevented by eating fresh fruits and meats sounded more like a folktale than reality. And early experiments to try to demonstrate this were also not that conclusive since vitamin c tends to break down rapidly in the conditions it was stored in (prejuiced - metal containers). For instance during Vasco de Gamma's journey from Europe to India he lost more than half his crew, mostly to scurvy.
And not all that survived the trip across made it much further. Typhoid or "ship fever" was killing a lot of the passengers and when they arrived in North America, they were put into quarantine camps where many died.
Another fun fact, the current population in Ireland is about 5.3 millions. That means there're more Irish in U.S. than in Ireland.
If you include Northern Ireland, it's 7.2 million. But it was 8.5 million before the famine; 6.5 immediately after. After that emigration drove that number down. The population size never recovered to pre famine levels.
My mistake. I did only look up the population in Ireland, forgot that Northern Ireland was part of Ireland until the 1900's.
Or you could say that Ireland was a part of Northern Ireland ;)
Census data I found is that Ireland has about 7.1 people.
But it also says that the year before the shit completely hit the fan, the Ireland population topped out at 8.18m. 10 years later it was down 1.6m, and another .6m after another 10. And it just kept trending downwards until the 1930's, (4.21m) and bottomed out again in ~1960 before it started growing again.
We may catch 'em on a per-capita basis too, if current immigration, emmigration, and tfr trends continue.
What do you mean?
I suspect it means: With mass immigration occurring in Ireland at the rate it is, soon the proportion of ethnic Irish in Ireland's population may match the proportion of ethnic Irish in the US's population.
Hyperbole is a common facet of humour (to make a point) in the British Isles.
All the better for Irish crew diversity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaaZsBxWeiQ
It's also one of the few (only?) countries in the world whose population is smaller today than it was 150 years ago.
And yet, so few of us Yanks speak it well. Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland.
Are you talking about the Irish language? Very few Irish people speak it well. Less than 2% use it daily.
I think GP is saying the Irish speak and write a more beautiful or clever English, the language adopted from their conquerors, than in the USA, or perhaps even England.
Correct, thank you.
I said “Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland” and wasn’t talking about Gaelic. The rich way they use English and the accent are spectacular
The fact that food was still being exported while people starved is just staggering. No wonder it left such deep scars and fueled the push for independence
> The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals
This is still happening in parts of the world.
In the Akkadian empire, archeologists found that every family house had a place to store wheat and other grains. That suggests that every family had the right to own enough land to survive.
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With all the respect and admiration I have for vast swathes of the population of that fair and noble land, one could nonetheless answer this title-question in a historically accurate and quite pithy manner, by stating simply:
"The English".
Exactly the answer I gave in my head after reading the title
I'm Irish and this is the correct answer
Pithy answers don't work. Almost everything is multi-causal.
It's almost as though you didn't read the article.
Although written earlier, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a chilling satire about the destitute of the Irish at the time and the English attitudes toward it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal.
The economist Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize partially for his research on famines and the conclusion that most are social and political. He was a young child during the Bengal famine (famously not due a food shortage) and witnessed it up close.
Of course food shortage was a factor;
> Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century;[25] coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Add to that transport impact (floods, war), the drop in imports from Burma and other factors.
FWIW, your quote doesn't support a food shortage being a cause since it says nothing about the relative change of total planted acreage.
I grew up on a farm near the hills of The Burren in the west of Ireland. If you look closely, you can see walls made of stacked stones cross-crossing the hills, as if to demarcate farmland - but those hills are not arable farmland, so why? The British refused to offer free food to the starving, so they made people build these completely pointless walls to “earn” the food. They’re now known as the Famine Walls.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_walls
https://archive.is/AfeHU
Whenever I see a tragedy, calamity, crash or whatever I almost always see one common factor: a lack of diversity somewhere. In this case it was in domestic food production. Whenever you look in nature and say 'that looks like a healthy ecosystem' it is almost always a system that is diverse and conversely when you see an ecosystem in distress it is generally lacking in diversity. As far as I know, diversity is the only real long term survival algorithm out there.
[edit] I should point out that I am not commenting on the cause of that lack of diversity, just the result of it.
The lack of diversity was not in food production, but rather in land ownership, and being able to own the fruits of your own labor. Plenty of food, just none of it for the Irish because they did not own the land.
Don’t forget to mention what happened when you tried to get some of that not your food so you could attempt to survive…
What, like stealing Cromwellian corn so the young might see the morn?
Win a free trip to Australia!
Is this a deliberate replacement for Trevelyan?
I made a guesstimate that it was cheaper for Britain to send unemployed people to Australia than it would be to feed them.
Definitely not. My line was from a very famous Irish song, called the fields of athenry, about exactly this.
And efficiency is mutually exclusive with flexibility. The more you optimise to do one thing the less you can easily do other things.
I think the evidence says you can have both. When I say 'the evidence' I mean just looking at nature. In nature you clearly see animals and plants that are massively more efficient at tasks than their ancestors all while living in more diverse environments and in larger numbers so clearly you can get both efficiency and flexibility gains. I think though your point has merit but I am finding it hard to write a super clear example of it. Maybe this is because there is a confusion between efficiency and temporary advantage? I think of efficiency more like an attempt to get the maximum infinite gain while a temporary advantage attempts to maximize the immediate gain only. It isn't an efficiency gain if you go out of business in 5 years just so you get a windfall now. With that in mind it is clear that you can create temporary advantages very easily but they may not be long term efficiency gains. Figuring out what is just a temporary gain and what is a long term efficiency gain is hard though. There are no crystal balls to tell you the truth of the future. Diversity in a system means that you will have a lot of different approaches to the problem to try which gives you more of a chance to find the long term efficiency instead of just a temporary advantage.
greed. food was produced in ireland and exported for profits while irish were starving. greed is not a matter of diversity.
get me right: I love diversity, diversity is a "must have". but greed is unrelated to diversity, isn't it?
Diversity isn't just nice to have, it's a survival mechanism
My parents were Irish,English so I'm always caught in the middle. It's obvious that many English people are inclined to ignore the opium trade or the famine and think about bits of history that make them feel good. I'd just mention that almost nobody is without skeletons in their national closet of one kind of another - probably less bad.
I am 50 and my understanding has changed over time. Like every teenager I wanted to be proud of who I was but fortunately being a mongrel creates a note of discord in one's head - who to be proud of?
The need to feel proud is a driver of all sorts of shit. We shouldn't feel ever more than a little proud or proud of what we personally have done but I'm not even sure of that. It's always a simplification. One should not have to call on history to respect oneself.
Irish people made use of the Empire too and went to the colonies to seek their fortunes. My dad was one. I was born in one and saw the recent Irish immigrants behaviour - they were a mixed bag like everyone else. Most were sort of ok and one or two were atrocious but not more or less than anyone else.
As a gross over-simplification, I think history is about people conquering other people and building larger and larger groups which become kingdoms then nations then empires or federations or unions. I get this feeling that it's mathematical. Whoever can organise on a large scale will absorb whoever is smaller.
So if we want to have a reasonable future, we must learn to organise on a large scale with negotiation and rules/laws so that someone can't absorb us by doing it the violent way.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo Sinead O'Connor - Famine
During this time, Ireland exported food to the mainland, lest british contracts be voided creating future doubt about the integrity of trade (or so I was taught)
I've always found this song about the Great Famine to be moving:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5onHLICxgc
This is another great one by Sinéad O'Connor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo
In 1847, one of the bleakest years of the Irish famine, Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I, Sultan of an Ottoman Empire offered £10,000 (which was quite a sum at the time) to help alleviate the suffering of the Irish people.
Queen Victoria, upon learning of this, requested that he reduce his donation to a more modest £1,000, so as not to embarrass her own relatively meagre offering of £2,000. Reluctantly, the Sultan agreed, but bolstered his contribution by secretly sending five ships loaded with food.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Britain-refuse-Ottomans-aid-to...
My conclusion is that the famine was as much political as it was environmental. (as they often are)
I agree with your conclusion, but this story is very badly sourced and really should not be used [0]. We only have two sources from the 1800s that claim it: one is contemporary but provides no attribution and we have no reason to believe they had firsthand knowledge. The other is 40 years later and is attributed to a conversation with the son of the sultan's personal physician. Yeah.
With such bad evidence for such an incendiary claim, I think we're better off sticking with the enormous amount of other evidence that policy caused the famine and letting this particular story die.
(What is true and backed up by evidence is that the sultan sent £1k. The rest has no reliable source.)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...
Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers. By Christine Kinealy
https://books.google.co.id/books?id=GnksAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PR4&hl=...
> He had originally offered £10,000 to the British Relief Association and some ships laden with provisions, but had been advised by British diplomats that British Royal protocol meant that nobody should contribute more than the Queen. It was suggested that he gave half the sum contributed by Victoria.
That was published in 2013. Do you have a physical copy that would allow you to see footnote 64 and see where this author got the story?
(The Google book has a lot of footnote 64s at the bottom, but it's impossible to see which corresponds to which chapter or to know if the 64 we're looking for is even there at all.)
Chapter 5-64: The Albion. A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, 21 July 1849.
The Ottoman Sultan's donation (or the US$170/£111 famously donated by a group of Native American Choctaw Nation, which is verified historical fact [0][1][2], or the £14,000 donated by Calcutta in 1846 [0], which is > Queen Victoria's subsequent 1848 donation) have nothing to do with arguing that British policy caused the famine.
They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed that their own charitable donations to a famine that killed 1 in 8 Irish people, were not that much and could be rivaled or outdonated (Calcutta) by private groups, even groups like the Choctaw who had just survived the Trail of Tears forced displacement/genocide 16 years before. (This is commemorated today by sculptures in Midleton, County Cork, Ireland "Kindred Spirits" and a companion sculpture in Tuskahoma, OK "Choctaw Ireland Monument"). By implication the Crown wasn't at all exercised about changing the setup in Ireland where most of the population were tenant farmers on the 90% of the land was foreign-owned. The landlords made a lot of money on exporting grain (esp. during the Napoleonic Wars until the price crashed). The tenants had essentially zero political representation in Westminster.
Nearly two centuries later, Ireland's population (all-island, Republic + NI) has still not recovered to the pre-Famine peak (1841, 8.175m est.) [3]. Predicted to finally happen sometime in the 2050s.
Curious if anyone has documented the massive imbalance in ownership in land in pre-Famine Ireland and compared it to other historical situations (Russia, colonial Americas, Africa, India, 1930s Ukraine) and their eventual outcomes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw_Nation_of_Oklahoma#For...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40304645
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_population_of_Irela...
> They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed
Again, to be clear, this anecdote is not verified. It is extremely poorly sourced, not much more than an urban legend. The only attribution for the story dating to the 19th century is a claim that someone heard it from the sultan's physician's son, and that claim is put forward more than 40 years after the events.
The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is the claim that I'm responding to. I'm not questioning that others did send donations or that some of those donations exceeded those put forward by the British government.
All of that is true, but it being true does not justify perpetuating unsubstantiated stories that happen to support the same conclusion. As you have amply demonstrated, there's enough good evidence in favor of the conclusion that we don't need to rely on bad evidence.
> > They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed
"They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.
> The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is to claim that I'm responding to.
But it's also claimed the Sultan's ships had to sail secretly, and north of Dublin to Drogheda, instead of simply unloading in Dublin, which would be faster and infinitely more logical (because the famine areas were in the west/southwest/south, not the northeast). So no, that would be a second piece of corroboration that he had needed to make the donation secretly (Why? Unless he had a fetish for being the Bruce Wayne of the 1840s. It makes no sense unless there was a reason.)
If I ever get a time machine I guess I'm dialing it to Sultan Abdülmecid's and Queen Victoria's residences in 1847 to plant listening devices to settle this for once and all. :)
But either way, even if the Ottomans never existed, the British Crown response was embarrassing, everything else is a sidebar. This all feels like it needs an AI treatment starring Joan Sims as Queen Victoria in one of the British "Carry On" comedies, and Syd James as the Sultan, and Paul Whitehouse ("Ralph and Ted") as token Irish tenant farmer. "Carry On Famine Relief".
> "They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.
Oh, I was interpreting your comment as relevant to mine rather than completely tangential. My mistake, as you were.
My comment is directly responsive to yours (and you now have triplicate threads where you're repeatedly challenging why): under all circumstances the Crown's response was inadequate, and disputing the anecdote about the Crown allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching that exact conclusion.
Further I showed you an independent piece of corroboration about whether the Sultan had to donate in secret, so it's absolutely not single-sourced to "one anecdote forty lears later by the Sultan's son."
Here's more corroboration by Drogheda people (and former President McAleese) that the Ottoman famine relief ships did in fact land in Drogheda (and inexplicably, not Dublin): https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-c... Since there is zero reason to waste time sailing urgently-needed food aid ships north past Dublin to a smaller port (Drogheda) from which it would take longer to distribute, that raises the obvious question why they did that. Go look at any map of Ireland to verify that, instead of mocking that.
As they say, you can not make a blind man see
Something even more remarkable, the Indians that where only a few years ago forcibly relocated and experienced their own starvations during the events of the Trail of Teers, collected about 700$ in donations and send it as aid to the starving Irish in a grand gesture of empathy amongst oppressed people.
I wrote a song called greenocide where my Irish friend explained this in a particularly straightforward way.
The English already owned all the land so they figured let the Irish die out. In essence.
That’s pretty much what the British did in Bengal.
Is there an academic source available for that?
Wikipedia says that the provenance is... sketchy, to say the least:
> The claim that he had wanted to give £10,000 first appears in Taylor & Mackay's Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (1851), but the book is not referenced and no source is given. A second source, dating to 1894, is more explicit: the Irish nationalist William J. O'Neill Daunt claimed to have heard from the son of the sultan's personal physician that he "had intended to give £10,000 to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only subscribed £1000, would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum…"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...
https://www.mfa.gov.tr/relations-between-turkiye-and-ireland...
The 1,000 Pound claim at least can be sourced from this website.
It very much was policy that killed the Irish and not the lack of food. Ireland exported enough food to feed the country four times over -- during the Famine.
This source notably does not make the claim that the amount was lowered in response to a request from Queen Victoria, which is the actually damning claim.
You seriously don't think that Calcutta donating more (£14,000) in 1846 and two years earlier than Queen Victoria (1848) isn't a damning fact? (and the Calcutta donation is a verified fact. So no need to dispute the anecdote about the Sultan's donation.)
As I mentioned in my response to your other comment, the controversial part of the anecdote is the claim that Victoria actually intercepted sent aid and convinced someone through diplomatic pressure to lower their intended donation.
OP does not bring up any additional donations besides the purported attempted donation from the sultan, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up as some kind of controversial thing: You're literally the first person to mention it here.
As I've said in my other comments, there's plenty of evidence that the British government both did far less than they should have to help with the famine and there's also evidence that they willfully exacerbated it. I fully accept and appreciate that. I have no clue why you're waving that evidence at me as some kind of gotcha when the only thing I'm disputing is this single specific story.
I specifically brought up the other donations to show that the Crown's response was inadequate, and the Calcutta donation in 1846 was both earlier and larger, this not only before Queen Victoria had not yet donated but not yet started (in 1847) encouraging Protestant landowners to fundraise in lieu of donating herself...
So under all circumstances her behavior wasn't impressive. Ok? I'm suggesting that disputing the anecdote about allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching the same conclusion.
That entire claim is unnecessary for the given conclusion, which is substantiated by other evidence.
Agreed. So there's no need to perpetuate claims whose provenance is "someone 40 years later claimed to have heard this from the sultan's physician's son" (see my reply to GP). We have plenty else to use.
Then there is no reason to include that part. It changes the entire tone of the British govt’s response.
Are we 100% in agreement that Queen Victoria's donation in 1848 was inadequate to prevent 1 million people from starving to death, and that Britain had direct responsibility for the gross inequality in land ownership that constituted Ireland in the 1840s, whereas the Ottoman Sultans, or Calcutta (or the Choctaw Nation) had zero responsibility?
I mean we could look at British spending (govt and crown) in the period 1845-52. Or note that Queen Victoria was one of the wealthiest women in the world, and Parliament granted her an annuity of £385,000 per year.
Yes, but the notion that a donation 10x larger was declined for optics is so fundamentally different from those claims I can’t even believe that there is any confusion here about how ridiculous including that is.
Why isn't "How did Queen Victoria spend her yearly £385,000 in 1845, and 1846, and 1847, and 1848" infinitely more relevant to deciding whether her documented lack of meaningful intervention should be considered embarrassing or not? I don't accept your framing at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria#Marriage_and_pu...
(Didn't know there were attempts to assassinate her in 1840, 1842, 1849 and 1850. Mostly by English people, btw.)
No one is questioning that all of this is relevant to the famine. All we're saying is that this specific story quoted by OP is most likely fictitious, so we're better off focusing on all of the other evidence and facts (such as the facts that you're bringing up).
I honestly have no clue what you're trying to argue here: No one is actually arguing with any of your points, nor did either of us give any indication that we would disagree with them in comments before you came. What you're bringing up is essentially a non-sequitur to what this subthread is actually about.
Conversely, I'm saying that disputing the anecdote about allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching the inescapable conclusion that the Crown's response was embarrassing and dwarfed by other donations (e.g. Calcutta).
(We have multiple threads on this, if you want to respond let's pick one to make primary.)
And as I've said, we agree, so I see no need to pick a thread to reply.
When political pride outweighs human lives, you know something is deeply broken. Definitely reinforces the idea that famines are rarely just about food shortages
> It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical reform of land ownership, which passed to a new class of Catholic farmers. The profoundly uncomfortable truth is that Ireland started to become modern when its poorest people were wiped out or sent into exile—a reality that is too painful to be faced without deep unease.
This makes the struggle to keep the Irish language feel like such a vital urge today. Those of you who live in SF be sure to check out the Unite Irish Cultural Center by the zoo.
Reading about the export of so much food while people starve reminds me also of the Holodomor, a famine where farmers grain was stolen from them and exported from the country while children starved in the streets. I have never seen a precentage of the population represented as here, but the estimates are 3M to 7M died from famine in the Ukrainian SSR, and today the population is 40M. And it's not as if nobody knew what was going on, when Stalin's second wife confronted him on his actions causing so much death, she was met with such a verbal assault that she committed suicide [ https://archive.is/xsCpP ]. The greed and lust for power and money to cause the death of millions is not limited to capitalism. I know of many strong connections between Ukrainians and Irish people, and have no doubt that this rhyming history may play into it.
The cause of these famines may be proximally blamed on a shortage of one type of crop, but when food is being exported from adjacent farms, as happened in both An Gorta Mor and the Holodomor, the true cause is not the lack of growing, the cause is the lack of control of the fruits on ones laber. People not being able to control their own land, not having a widespread group of smallholders of land that can benefit from their own work, from not having administrative control by the majority of people. There's a lesson for us who farm digital land; do we own the land or are we sharecropping?
We must fight autocracy in all its forms, lest many of us starve. Those who oppose democracy have killed millions and will do so again if given the chance.
We went to the Dunbrody Famine ship exhibit in New Ross, Ireland a few years back. It was a neat exhibit, first they seat you in a dark small room and show a movie detailing the situation, then the wall opens up and the ship is nicely framed in the view, sitting outside in the River Barrow.
They then take you out to tour the ship.
"Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" is a great book by Mike Davis about similar famines in the late 19th century caused by colonial powers putting profits and the sanctity of markets above human lives during periods when forces in the natural world impacted food production (climate swings in this case).
One of the most interesting and informative books I've ever read. Depressing as fuck though.
Such an amazing writer and yet I never want to read his work because... yeah.
We lost a real giant.
Eerie.
Answer: The British.
After some discussion with some friends from the former "colonizer", it just occurred to me that apparently it's very hard for people from those countries to appreciate their countries' role for a lot of massacre, genocide or any man made disaster like this kind of famine. They always find ways to deflect their countries responsibilities with some "reasons", although they generally agree that any kind of genocide is wrong.
I think this is what we witness today too, with some massacres and genocides going on. People from those colonizer countries just can't relate to the victims. Maybe deep down they acknowledge that those genocides are good, or at least necessary, because those things are what brings them prosperity they enjoy today.
“The British” did not genetically engineer the potato blight.
Further, in the 19th century state capacity was small and massive modern style relief programmes were not possible. Despite this, Britain managed to spend a large degree of GDP on relief. Proportionately more than it did on covid response recently, for example.
The reason people deny british culpability for “genocide” is that there was no “genocide” and britain did what it was able to do, to an unprecedented degree in fact. If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
>If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
Some examples of Britain's response:
* Establishing soup kitchens for the starving, where, to acquire food one must renounce your religion, anglicise your name, and abandon your native tongue.
* Provide maize for the starving and destitute but not for free for fear it would generate a sense of self-importance amongst the millions who are dying of hunger
* Maintaining the exportation vast amounts of food to Britain throughout the Great Hunger
* Requiring the starving who couldn't afford to buy food from the British to build pointless walls in order to earn that food
* Forcibly evicting the starving and dying from their homes because they couldn't pay their rent for some reason
* Denying aid to anyone who owned more than a quarter-acre of land, forcing starving farmers to give up their land and become destitute in order to qualify for relief
So, on behalf of all those before me in Ireland; go raibh maith agat.
Well, I can't even comprehend how mind like yours works.
No, but they did engineer an economic system where all the food that the Irish grow gets sent overseas while the latter starve.
The Soviets built a similar system a century later in Ukraine, it's product was called the Holodomor.
The entire reason there was a famine was due to absentee landlords who demanded absolutely everything but the bare minimum from farmers for the "right" to work on "their" land.
Yes, the real victims of the Irish famine were the unappreciated, overly criticized British. Will the horror ever fade?
Ouch. Yes. I agree.
This may be an unpopular take, and my 99.6% celtic DNA won't justify it, but perhaps St Patrick still hasn't stopped driving the snakes out of Ireland, and these days he's resorted to famine, insurgency and abortion to accomplish it?
Calling it a "famine" is a controversial choice.
The parallels to modern crises are unsettling, especially the idea that -the market must be obeyed at all costs-
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.
Crop failures are natural disasters. Famine's are political disasters.
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-...
Also Irish person here. My primary school was 100m from one of the old workhouses, and I was taught from maybe age 7 what happened there. All the old stone walls in the nearby fields were built by forced famine labor. There's abandoned roads to nowhere (famine roads) all around, likewise built by forced labor.
I think it was taught quite well, and people around me while I was growing up didn't downplay it. It's still a significant event in the Irish psyche, especially in the parts of the country most deeply effected at the time.
The things it's, though, it's a fairly distant historical event at this stage, and I don't think it's healthy or helpful to the Irish collective psyche to hold on to it as strongly as we still do - not just the famine but all aspects our being "the oppressed". We're no longer oppressed, we're a privileged and filthy rich country (even if it doesn't feel like that right now, but we have no one to blame for the housing crisis except our own politicians and capitalists).
While we should be mindful of the English tendency to play down and rewrite history, I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English - defended with the tired caveat the "oppressed people can't be racist towards the oppressors". Yes, they can. Maybe it's a less harmful form of racism, but it holds back the psychological development of the person with racist views nonetheless.
In secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates. There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.
I'm not saying any of this to defend the English - they did terrible things in history, and those must not be forgotten or rewritten. There's also a fair few English people who are racist towards Irish too, not to mention a lot of "harking back to the glory days of Empire", mostly from older English men whose ancestors were probably peasants back then.
But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche which I struggled with a lot growing up, and it holds back out country. It's time we moved on.
Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.
> I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English
I'm Irish. I've spent a lot of time in the countryside and the cities. This is not true. It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British
> secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates.
These days its justa catchy rebel chant. It does not necessarily mean the people chanting it support the IRA
> There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.
No there's not.
I can think of maybe 2 pubs in Dublin you might get an unfrindly welcome. On a bad day.
> But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche
You're really really over stating how prevalent this is
> a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off.
We did. Remember the referendum? The one where we collectively voted to remove the territorial claim from our constitution?
Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.
There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.
> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British
Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.
> Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.
Maybe we have different lived experiences? We can both be Irish and have very different lives and experiences, small country though it is.
For me, nothing I said is exaggerated. Irish people do hate to state things directly though, and I'm used to be told to be quiet whenever I speak out about our issues.
> There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.
Ok can't argue with that one.
Another Irish person here… Going to have to agree with biorach on this one, but not by a lot.
>> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British >Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.
The Irish that are racist against the British are, in my experience, the American who have things to say about other groups, ethnicities, religions.
Not uncommon, not prolific, but not the crowd you’d go hang out with either.
"There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with."
Thanks for making me laugh for a bit before I went back to staring at my screen in disbelief.
Sure, it's unhelpful to dwell too much on the past, but I don't think the Ireland of today is as consumed by victimhood or anti-Britishness as you are making out. I don't doubt there are pockets of society where anti-British sentiment is still strong but there is no society in the world without similar pockets of backwards, racist thinking. By and large, Irish people do not dislike or begrudge British people. While Brexit stoked some of the old tensions (again, we were far from the only country getting frustrated with Britain during those negotiations) we have, both before and since, largely regarded the British as our friends and allies.
The famine was a huge event in our history. Our population still hasn't recovered from it and the mass emigration it triggered still has an impact on our relations with other countries, particularly the US. We shouldn't be (and aren't) consumed by it but it would be madness to forget it. The same goes for our broader struggle for independence, which is literally the origin story of our country.
> Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.
The Irish position on the North is clear and has been since 1998. We don't lay claim to it so there is nothing to "let go". No one questions the right of the North to choose its own way, but equally we have a relationship and a history with that part of the island that we cannot just ignore.
It’s important to teach about bad times during the good times, because the horrors of what humans are capable of seem unfathomable with time and distance.
I'm American of Irish descent and have spent a lot of time in Ireland. The walls mentioned were sort of an academic trick. They had to do "work" to get "paid" and so they were made to just build walls so that they could then be paid in food and not starve.
If you hike around and see them, it's stunning. They were handmade. The rocks weren't insitu, they were carried in. It's not the pyramids, but in a relatively contemporary time they were made rather than just providing assistance.
"Up the RA" is a great slogan. The IRA made an important and undeniable contribution to Irish statehood. I don't think we'd be "a privileged and filthy rich country" were it not for their activities in the 20th century. There is an unfortunate tendency among some people to be unwilling to recognise that for fear of offending our neighbours to the east. As you say, it's in the distant past and not worth getting too offended about.
They also did that to Bengal in the famine there much later. It's a pattern with the Brits.
This discussion is a relevant time to recommend the fantastic book called "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" by the indomitable late Mike Davis.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts
Ireland was the prototype for the British empire starving millions to death because they were poor.
The British?
The author wants you to believe the Irish Famine was caused by free-market extremism. This couldn't be further from the truth. Ireland wasn’t starving because of free markets — it was starving because Britain’s mercantilist policies blocked it from importing food from outside the empire.
The British forced Ireland to rely on their overpriced grain, banned direct imports from the U.S. and Europe, and kept tariffs high with the Corn Laws — all while millions starved. That’s not laissez-faire. That’s imperial economic control designed to keep Ireland dependent on politically connected domestic producers.
O’Toole’s omission of this amounts to deception. He’s twisting history to fit a narrative, blaming capitalism while letting British trade restrictions, protectionism, and outright exploitation off the hook.
The Irish Famine was a disaster of Britain's mercantilist policies. Whitewashing that to score political points for his illiberal domestic agenda is an insult to history.
Why not both?
The mercantilist economic policy of the UK was an abject failure that made its people poorer and prevented the import of cheap food.
But the UK’s unwillingness to provide sufficient aid once the famine had already started was motivated by laissez-faire politics and a Malthusian belief that the famine was the Irish’s own fault for overbreeding.
Remember that the government with the support of the Whigs and Radicals actually repealed the Corn Laws, it was just too little too late. Ironically the Whig’s free market beliefs if enacted in policy much earlier might have prevented the famine from happening in the first place, while simultaneously meaning they weren’t interested in properly mitigating it once it did happen.
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Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Especially not on divisive topics, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html requests:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I didn’t provide citations, that doesn’t mean it’s unsubstantiated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326908
This is the story historians and people of Irish extraction (almost 12% of the US population, including myself) pay more attention to. Lots of people fled during the Famine and found their way to the US.
dredmorbius pointed it out already, but I think there was a misunderstanding here. I don't know what did or didn't cause the famine (that's why I said "maybe so" above). I just know that your GP comment took the form of an internet snark post, rather than a thoughtful informative comment. We want the latter, not the former, on HN.
That's the difference, btw, between your GP comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326908, which I agree was a good post. Your post and that one are taking more or less the same position but one is snarky and lacks information, while the other is snark-free and provides plenty of information.
Unsubstantive != unsubstantiated.
<https://www.wordnik.com/words/unsubstantive>
<https://www.wordnik.com/words/unsubstantiated>
The man in charge of the British response to the great hunger was Charles Trevelyan. He famously said of the Irish "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God's providence."
The British actively exported grains meats and other food leaving the local population to starve.
It was a famine only because they made it one.
He also famously suggested that the Irish should simply grow corn, if there was a potato blight. As if, in the middle of a famine, farmers can simply pivot to another crop that they've never grown before.
I don’t think Ireland grows corn today. The wiki page for Irish agriculture doesn’t even mention it, which I interpret as “not enough grown to be noteworthy”.
We grow maize, which is what we call corn, here. In significant quantities, using modern agricultural methods. Even with that the climate is not totally suitable and it is mostly used for animal feed.
I very much doubt it would have been possible to grow sustainable amounts of maize up until recent decades
And unless something changes with corn strains and agriculture, possibly not again in another four or five. It's a very thirsty boy. Both in water and nitrogen.
It wasn't a famine - it was a genocide
to me that is the gist. Genocide by the system without the people in the system intending it to happen (with those people even trying to mitigate its damage) It has been happening again and again - a system follows orthodoxy/ideology despite its subjects mass dying as a result, and we still don't have a machinery in place which should serve as emergency brakes on any system once that system, for whatever, and frequently even good sounding reasons at that, starts to cause such pain and suffering and deaths:
>Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
>Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
They literally fired cannons from warships at people protesting the exportation of food when they are starving to death.
Can't have them stealing someone else's profits...
I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve. I'd suspect they were enforcing the laws of public order and trade. That is the systemic issue - the laws taking precedence over mass starving. And we still don't have a good solution to such issues - just look at the recent court decision and city actions on homeless even here in Silicon Valley, one of the most richest place. And 700M people faced hunger in 2023. Almost 10%. Why we can't help them? I see the same systemic issue as the machinery of the current economic order (really powerful, no doubt, and the best we could so far come up with as a civilization) still fails here.
The arguments stemming from the rule of law always remind of this:
The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
This is very clever and an interestingly adversarial (the unjust steal from the just) take on the quote that came to my mind: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
They complement each other beautifully.
I didn’t have a Hacker News thread where George Pataki is held up as some fenian and British sailors shelling a starving mob are misunderstood, well-intentioned chaps on my bingo card.
Yet here we are. Should you ever find yourself up against the wall during the revolution, take solace that the boys don’t take it personally at all.
It's not their fault. They think it's normal to turn every conversation into one about the homeless in California pooping on the streets.
If anything it's our fault for letting them turn every conversation into this one.
> I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve.
While I take your broader point about it being a system level issue - when you’re firing cannon at starving people so you can continue to export their food, you’re complicit, laws be damned.
Systems don’t emerge from the aether they are composed of by people. In this case the people were absolute bastards.
The guards at Auschwitz were perpetually drunk, because they couldn't stand what they were doing. Were they complicit in the holocaust? YES!
That is the point - after countless deaths we produced the principle of "carrying out a criminal order is a crime", yet we still see the people committing atrocities and going unpunished because they were just carrying out the orders. And that makes me think that we're still missing something important.
Well the folks giving the orders obviously have mixed feelings about the whole idea that their orders could be criminal.
> I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve.
Yeah they wanted them to explode.
Really? "Just following orders"? Did that work in Nuremberg?
Apparently we don't like this idea that a "system" can cause a genocide. Instead, we rather want to believe that only people with bad intentions are doing bad things, and that if something dramatic happen it must be because some people wanted it that way, despite the enormous amount of evidence showing that our individual volition adds almost no weigh in the course of history.
I suppose that this fallacy comes partly from the fear that people guilty of criminal negligence or hateful prejudice would escape punishment. Like that person who mentioned Nuremberg in his response. Well, no of course, that many circumstances are necessary for a genocide to happen beside just the will of the criminals, do not free anyone participating in it from the responsibilities of their actions (or lack thereof).
But I also suspect this is coming from a deeper, darker psychological bias. This belief that there are "villains" behind every crime may just be the necessary belief to justify our own wrong behavior. We do not intend to cause any harm to anyone, yet we let a lot of unjust things happen every day. We walk past some people in need for assistance every day, but we can't help everyone right?, on our way to work in some IT corporation that's also helping build bombs or military IA that's going to be used in yet another unfair war but a good defense industry is necessary right? So in order for this thought to work as justification, we need to believe that, as long as we do not intend to cause harm, then we are in the green.
The machinery we need to prevent the system we all play a small part into from causing such crimes of historical scale is that we should acknowledge and learn about the system. That's not enough to learn history ; in an advanced democratic society we would learn some sociology from middle school.
> the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognize that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.”
I’m sure that high minded distinction would be appreciated by the barely self-sufficient tenant farmer, banished to the west when his ancestors were ethnically cleansed a few generations past, when he was evicted and left to starve.
This wasn’t capitalism any more than the depredations in India or Africa. It was a colonial state, which existed to extract considerable wealth to build and support a vast empire.
I think performing apologetics for a system that resulted in the genocide of a people is a difficult position to hold. At some point you need to hold the people who perpetuate the system accountable for the devastation it causes. This is a difficult thing to do on a SV based startup forum. I love drones!
It isn't apologetic. It is a statement of "we're still not able to fix/avoid it or similar to it" almost 200 years later.
> At some point you need to hold the people who perpetuate the system accountable for the devastation it causes.
Naturally, that beyond the debate. Unfortunately we still fail to effectively unwind the system behavior back to responsible people (and there is whole theory on whether in general it is possible at all and to what extent)
Like the Holodomor, like the Bengal famine, this was a genocide.
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"There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now."
Many countries took in a lot of refugees from both Ukraine and Syria. Syria used to take in refugees from all over the middle east.
Canada alone approved over a million applications from Ukraine, numbers that have actually come are more in the 300,000 range.
But, would that happen today? Trump has stated the intention to deport Ukrainian refugees.
There is a whole world outside of the USA.
Trump is not president in Canada (or Germany — see Syrian refugees). I hope this helps!
There’s no famines going on anywhere in Latin America. Yet we had more immigrants to the U.S. last year than during the entire ten year period from Ireland during the great famine.
...do you mean per capita? because all of latin america has north of 600 million people, versus (at the time of the famine) ireland's ~7 million, so "more" would in strict terms be very unsurprising. Like it would basically be a given that a whole continent contributes far more immigrants than a small country.
Google's automated result on "irish immigration to america during the potato famine" suggests ~1.5 million Irish folks resettled in America during the famine, though the first source I checked[1] claimed ~2M. No automated google result came back for "total latin american immigration to america 2015-2025", but this article[2] claims that the immigrant latin american population was ~2.73M in 2010 and ~3.91M in 2020, an increase of 1.2M people over 12 years. That feels like it could be low, so a second check over on Wikipedia[3] claims that total immigration from "the americas", including Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc., totaled ~4.22 M from 2012-2022, the most recently included year. Technically that is more in absolute numbers, if you also stretch the definition of Latin America, I guess?
So, what the heck are you talking about? Can you back those claims up?
1 - https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Co...
2 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-american-immig...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
You might wonder why the state of affairs in Latin America drives people to hard lives in the US.
A certain large country to the north had a policy of destabilizing economic, covert action and direct military action in place to save these nations from the horrors of socialism.
When you build empire, there’s always a pull of your subjects to the center.
Preventing Latin American countries from forming alliances with the USSR does not constitute turning Latin American into imperial possessions: they are different levels of influence or control.
American imperialism moved past that. Our tools are economics and banking. Places like Central America and Indonesia were all about economics. Guatemala has historically been dominated by fruit companies.
Sometimes it spills over. The domination of Chile transitioned from pulling the levers of banking and capital access to a full on CIA sponsored coup, followed by the Pinochet experience. NAFTA was great for the top-line numbers for the US and Canada, but nuked the Mexican agricultural economy. (Repeating what we did within the US)
Critical thinking is a good thing. When you read about people packing up their family and meager belongings to walk through hostile Mexico, to then pay a gangster to smuggle you across the Sonora, so you can work some menial labor job in the US… the question “why?” should come to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
Let's not argue semantics here: The fact that latin american countries did not turn into Puerto Rico does not mean the imperialist action was not executed.
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> You’re correct. The American empire has been terrible for Latin America. We should dismantle the empire and close the borders to immigration.
Do you realize that if the USA had been run the way you advocate that you'd never have lived there in the first place?
> Do you realize that if the USA had been run the way you advocate that you'd never have lived there in the first place?
Of course! But I’m not a child and I’m capable of conceiving of what would be “good” separate and apart from what would be “good for me.”
Indeed, as someone with a large south asian family that immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia, and who is especially well acquainted with Anglo-Protestant culture, I’m particularly well positioned to form the opinions that: (1) assimilation is slow and doesn’t happen completely; and (2) even high skill immigration, at scale, isn’t conducive to maintaining our american participatory democracy.
The present could never be the past. Having said that, never in History there has been so much migration.
There has been large scale migration throughout recorded history. Just look at the endless problems the Romans had with the migration of groups such as the Goths and the Vandals, who were themselves displaced by the Huns.
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This should be your daily reminder that every famine is political, meaning it is the result of one group of people willing to starve another group of people. In this case, the British starved the Irish.
This whole thing was exacerbated by relatively few landholders and a system of rent-seeking landlords that only worked when there was a good potato crop so when that failed, the English remained fed, the land tenants could no longer produce enough to eat and the Irish starved.
The world now produces an excess of food yet millions die of famine every year. We are quite deliberately letting people starve while food rots.
The world produces excess of food but the distribution costs are very high for example. Would you go into debt sending food to another country or are you relying on the government to bear the burden of that through taxes? There’s a secondary factor which is that we’ve learned through efforts in the 80s that charity breeds dependence and the food aid drives often had a paradoxical effect of preventing those countries from building up their own local farm base which is more harmful long term for everyone involved. I don’t think it’s quite clear and dry as you paint it and that every famine is the result of one group intentionally trying to starve another.
>we’ve learned through efforts in the 80s that charity breeds dependence
Is this the sort of thinking that led to the famine walls being built?
Why do people think this?
Well, that's the thing, right? If we were thinking about humanity as a global populace, the second (bear the burden of that through taxes) would be the obvious answer, for precisely the same reason Americans in Florida pay taxes into a FEMA system to address wildfires in California, even if they never visit California. Besides ideological reasons, there's also the practical that that same FEMA is going to help Florida the next time it's hurricane season.
The concern about suppressing local agriculture is relevant (although I do wonder if one can make the same argument regarding FEMA and "suppressing local blue-tarp manufacturing"). But if food rots while people starve, the taxes probably aren't high enough. We've recognized (in the US, at least) the role of government in distribution and management of distribution policy since at least the Great Depression.
It's pretty clear in this case - instead of sending the food _out_ of Ireland then keep it there.
Like excuse me what the fuck is that word salad?
On the plus side, hunger is decreasing quickly.
For the couple of remaining places with hunger, the causes are political as you say. But the rest of the world is in most cases not "letting it" happen. We're sending food and aid, sometimes at risk to the aid workers delivering the food.
> We're sending food and aid
We (US) were, now we are cutting back. People will starve because of this.
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You can make the case for that, but a disorderly transition to that kind of system will ensure that some people starve to death before the new system is in place.
I don't have any of the purported 'savings' in my pocket right now and I don't suppose I'll see them any time soon, so I don't have any extra money. Quite the contrary, what with the stock market tanking.
why do that when laws have already been passed about sending that money abroad?
id much rather add better transparency and audits to the money already being spent through the government
well, that didn't work (waiting for audits and transparency) for 20+ years, so we're doing it this way now. Donate to causes you believe in, don't rely on the government to do good. do it yourself.
The person you help abroad today is the person not going to take your stuff tomorrow.
Even the notoriously woke Roman Emperors would hand out grain to the crowd.
That's an awful lot of rowing to come take our "grain."
and if this concerns you, donate.
Depends who "we" are in this context of course, but there's a middle eastern country whom the USA shower with military aid, that is committing a genocide and using starvation as a weapon, and the US is absolutely letting, even encouraging that to happen.
I've always seen it as a logistical problem. With the Irish famine the British had a sophisticated world spanning logistical system that deliberately de-prioritized the Irish, even during an active famine that was a consequence of their own design. It's hard not to point fingers here when the culprit is obvious.
With modern famines it becomes more nuanced though imo. The logistical systems are not already in place like with Ireland, they are often built and sustained reactively, like a bridge during a storm. Some never "turn off" properly and undercut local farmers creating a stronger potential for future famines in the region. The solution isn't just allowing everyone to starve of course, but doing a better job at the follow-up work.
I'm not saying this is some impossible problem, just that it's a delicate one despite best intentions. Food grown in abundance in one region of the world might be rotting by the time it arrives where it's needed. While we have systems through the UN and non profits for this I still think we could do a lot better.
They used that logistics system to export most of the food that Ireland produced as they were growing more food than they needed, not even counting potatoes. But the English would pay more, so another great free market experiment.
USAID has been gutted, and yes, it was political.
Which is why most non-failed countries try to self-sustain a large amount of their food requirements and agriculture is subsidized and protected. But it also means food export isn't a big business.
Which countries are these?
Pretty much all western ones.
I'm not aware of any Western countries that don't have a significant dependency on imported food (and many with a large food export)
They all subside agriculture and do seek ability to produce necessary food. That does not excludes trade or import - you can live without bananas and oranges if you can't produce them. You needs to produce calories in some form.
Let's talk about the way in which the West uses the IMF and World Bank to create economic crises and famine. Specifically, let's talk about Somalia. The playbook is basically this:
1. A country borrows money for some project. There's often corruption involved here (as the leaders siphon off work to make themselves rich);
2. The IMF imposes conditions on those loans. These includes financializing the food supply. Typically, what might've been a self-sufficient agricultural sector tends to get banned from producing food for themselves. Instead they have to produce export crops and buy food from, surprise surprise, Western nations. This tends to lead to a drop in food prices that means farmers can no longer support themselves. They then often become destitute and move to cities to find work;
3. If the loan is for an infrastructure project, it's usually Western companies doing it so the US is funding the IMF to give money to Western companies, basically;
4. As inevitably happens, the currency ends up tanking. The foreign food that decimated local production is now much more expensive in local terms. The government's ability to service the debt also gets savaged;
5. The IMF steps in with "structural programs" (including those like the financialization of agriculture) to take money out of the government to service IMF debt, which has similar devastating effects "austerity" measures do in Western countries;
6. The country is now trapped in debt, so much so that some call this "debt colonialism".
This has happened to Haiti and other countries.
The point is that Western interference most often comes with destroying agricultural self-sufficiency, creating famine.
> every famine is political
Well probably not those directly caused by natural disasters at least.
All famines are caused by natural disasters. What makes them political is that people die when their ability to overcome natural disasters is restricted or removed.
E.g. for the Irish Famine, the natural disaster was the outbreak of the phytophthora infestans disease affecting potato crops - the outbreak spread from North America across Europe, affecting Belgium, Netherlands, France & the UK. The cause of death in Ireland was the English exporting all food produced in Ireland that wasn't potatoes. An interestingly relevant historical record here is the Australian Convict Collection showing the number of Irish convicts sent to Australia & Tasmania for stealing food during the famine years.
>All famines are caused by natural disasters.
The great leap forward would like a word with you.
> All famines are caused by natural disasters.
I don't think I'd consider war to be a form of natural disaster, or even related to one in the majority of cases.
Many of those convicts were children.
So far, if it's lasted long enough to be considered a famine, it's political. Yes, there's temporary and severe interruptions due to natural disasters, but if the political will is there, resources would be able to arrive anywhere in the world in the matter of days.
Modern famines, sure. But I think that's a relatively recent development. It also isn't guaranteed. A sufficiently large volcanic eruption could severely impact agriculture the world over.
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> Catholic church that pushed people to reproduce without limits
[Citation needed]
It's hard not to interpret this as just garden variety bigotry, of the same sort that caused the famine in the first place.
Let's assume it's correct, though. The Catholic church had been one of the most powerful organisations in Europe for well over 1000 years by the time if the famine. Why did it take until Ireland in the 19th century for their population mismanagement to become truly problematic? Also why did this not also happen in a country like Spain? Hard to find many more enthusiastically Catholic countries than Spain in that time period.
The population density of Ireland at the time of the famine was comparable to England (it is now much lower). Ireland produced enough food to feed itself and millions of people in English cities at the time of the famine. The issue was not a lack of food but the "ownership" of the food.
The account of capitalism emerging from the black death is a fine theory for continental Europe. At the time of the black death, Irish society was controlled by Irish people. After the 1600s it was increasingly run as a colony, with the indigenous culture outlawed and intensive resource extraction for export to England (timber, food, etc).
You might as well ask why industrialisation didn't take off among the Choctaw or the Cherokee. Or maybe they also just have the wrong religion?
Easy peasy, famines were commonplace in Spain during the Middle Ages (not sure how about part of it that was controlled by the Muslims though, but i don't think it was much different). During the Middle Ages, famines (and epidemics) were the natural regulator of population and were seen as a normal thing. By the XIX century of course, things were very different....
In Spain at the period, there were no famines because people kept emigrating to the colonies. Ireland was itself a colony. That's the difference. In Eastern Europe where countries didn't have colonies, famines were a norm.
Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming that for the time being, provided plenty of food allowing population to build up. Then it backfired.
As for local populations pre-existing in the colonies, sure they almost all died out. To a much larger proportion than the Irish, and sometimes, went entirely extinct. That is the normal part of absorbing new lands. It's just that Ireland was Christian almost since Christianity became a thing, and was never "discovered", that made it special. But we shouldn't pretend like it wasn't normal or in any way exceptional overall. Genocide is a natural way in which nations interact.
> Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming
There was no overpopulation problem in Ireland! It was _less_ dense than England, while having similar climate and agricultural capacity. The reason for the famine was that the food that was abundantly produced in Ireland was transferred to England to support their cities (which did have an overpopulation problem). There was more than enough food produced in Ireland to feed everyone in Ireland. That is not what overpopulation looks like.
It's also easy to say no major famines happened in Spain because of her colonies, except that by the time of the famine she had very few remaining. Spanish people had the same capacity to emigrate to the Americas as the Irish did. Your argument was that Irish people were too Catholic to control their population but you haven't addressed the fact that that wasn't a problem in any of the other Catholic countries. The same should be true of Italy, who didn't even have a former empire to call on.
> [Citation needed]
What, exactly, indicated to you that the above is a quote from elsewhere?
That does not indicate that it's thought to be a quote, [Citation Needed] indicates that it needs a supporting source to validate the statement. It is commonly used on Wikipedia to denote statements on a page that do not have proper supporting information, and should therefore not be uncritically accepted.
> That does not indicate that it's thought to be a quote
So you are indicating that a summons is necessary? That makes even less sense...
> [Citation Needed] indicates that it needs a supporting source to validate the statement.
But, logically, the person making the comment is the supporting source. That is, after all, why you are taking time to speak to them instead of some other source. If you find another source is more valid to what you seek, why not go directly to it instead? A middleman offers nothing of value.
> It is commonly used on Wikipedia to denote statements on a page that do not have proper supporting information
Sure. The entire purpose of Wikipedia is to aggregate information about topics from external sources. Citations are needed. It would not serve its intended purpose without them. But a wiki is quite unlike a discussion forum. A discussion forum is a venue to speak with the primary source...
...which is what ended up happening anyway, making the "[Citation Needed]" of any interpretation even stranger.
I don't understand much of your comment.
Maybe this page will help us come to common understanding: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/citation-needed
> I don't understand much of your comment.
I'd have offered you a citation, but repeating what someone else said seems rather silly.
> Since gaining its catchphrase status, "citation needed" has been used in online discussion forums to humorously point out biased or baseless statements made by others.
So what you are saying is that someone thought could be funny by posting a tired meme? That may be true, but still doesn't make sense.
The original post was arguing that there were too many Irish people in Ireland because of the predominant religion. The implication, as I surmise, is that Catholics believe that only those who are constantly reproducing can be real BFFs with Jesus in the afterlife. Also, Catholics are seemingly too stupid to realize that Ireland is incapable of supporting more than 5-6 million people (apparently?) and therefore their mortal sex-cult doomed them and they have absolutely nobody to blame but themselves for a million people dying of starvation. The fools!
This is, at best, very fucking stupid. At worst, it is fairly bigoted and more than a little bit offensive. It is in the same category of Victorian pseudo-science that gave us phrenology and eugenics.
"[Citation needed]" was merely meant as a shorter and much more polite way of implying all of the above. I can be much less polite if that's something you're interested in.
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I've never met an Irish person that "blames" the modern English for what our ancestors did. I might be talking out of turn, but I think they mainly just want us to acknowledge what happened and not downplay what the British did.
I met plenty when I lived there and plenty in the UK too.
Even while trying to acknowledge the sins of our past and sympathise with them (in all honesty), they still treated me like crap for who I am and where I'm from. That's just xenophobia
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Ireland is full of resilient people who fought and bombed their way to their own freedom from the British. I think they will overtake the British economy before 2825
The Irish economy overtook the British one by most measures some time ago (arguably partially as a result of the UK’s problems with regional development; the British economy, at this point, is verging on basically just being London and its immediate area).
Yes, the Irish economy is bigger than the British, all you have to do to get that answer is: count all the revenue of famous Irish corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel (and others) as Irish revenue, and divide by the respective populations (6M and 70M).
Definitely do not think any further about these measures, just report them as Ireland ^ and UK v.
Yes, GDP figures for Ireland and other small open economies (and, for that matter, _London_, which has the same sort of dynamic) are pretty useless; this is fairly well-known. However, Irish average wages overtook UK ones after the financial crisis, concrete economic activity is generally higher (for instance, Ireland builds about 2.5x the number of housing units per capita per year), the Irish state pension is higher, Irish unemployment is lower, Irish inflation is much lower, and so on.
And it’s much starker when you compare Ireland to Northern Ireland (the bit of Ireland that the UK still runs), or, really, to the North of England or most other UK regions (again, really, the whole UK economy hangs off the south-east). The idea that Ireland would be _better off in 2025_ if it had stayed part of the UK is… pretty out-there, to be honest. The UK is simply very bad at regional development.
Ireland _was_ an economic basketcase for a very long time, but then, realistically, so was most of the UK; more or less since WW2 the UK outside of London and the south-east has been looking pretty unhealthy.
National economic statistics -- GDP, GNI etc. only tell you so much. Measures of human wellbeing I'd argue tell you more.
Ireland is ahead of the UK on every metric, from child mortality to longevity and everything in between -- and the gap is widening.
Lol exactly
Dublin's GDP is a greater % of Ireland's GDP than London is of the UK's.
Ireland has a "regional development" problem too
You’d expect that, though; the Greater Dublin Area isn’t far off half the population. And most of the GDP-skewing activity is in Dublin; Irish GDP numbers in general just aren’t very useful. You don’t see the same gap in wages and standard of living between Dublin and the west that you see between, say, London and Wales, though.
...such a shame for all the kids that were killed, though.
Yeah I agree. I don't know why the Brits insisted on cruelty to that magnitude in every place they ruled. I mean yes historically it was common, but they continued it way later into history than most peoples did, or perhaps it's my naivety.
The use of official wording to describe a crime against humanity against the Irish (speaking as an Irish person) continues today. Almost every western news media has used official speaking language to under-report the situation in Gaza or to excuse Israeli crimes against humanity. Consider this report [1], where Israeli children get emotions, and Palestinian children are "found dead" with no culprit or explanation for how that might have happened. This has happened repeatedly throughout Israel's genocide on the Palestinian people (lots of examples at [2]), and the same things are now being used to underplay Trump/America's attacks on migrants and trans people.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DGYlvC1tHnR/
[2] https://www.instagram.com/newscord_org/
England. Is it even a question?
Look at JetSetWilly's reply above. He's saying the British should be proud of their role in the Irish Famine and is being upvoted for it.
So no -- this isn't undisputed.
I think JetSetWilly's opinion is not the normal in England, at least around people my age.
I was always taught what a lot of people here say, that the potato blight was a natural disaster, but the British government took it as an "opportunity" and purposely did not do enough to help.
In my personal opinion, I think that few people would have died if the British government stepped up, not the many millions that died as a result of their inaction. As an English person, I'm not proud of what our government did to Ireland over the years. Ireland is a beautiful country with great people, and it took a long time even to get the relationship between the UK and Ireland to where it is now.
The brits made it deadly
Not having food.