Requiring calorie-heavy diets to carry out their punishing workloads, [the Irish impoverished tenant farmers] were soon consuming between 40 and 60 potatoes every day.
I'd imagine how much actual calories that is depends on the size of the potatoes. When potatoes fail, they often do so by producing tiny tubers. The smallest I personally ate were less than an inch in diameter.
Also,people who don't do any farming don't realise how much effort goes into pest/disease control. Especially with potatoes the main pest around here(central Europe) is Colorado Potato Beetle (if that is the correct name for it in English). It is an extremely resilient organism. It very quickly starts tolerating all insecticides that are allowed around here. And between seasons it gets into the ground half meter deep. So unless you want to destroy your soil there is no getting rid of it once it establishes itself somewhere. The only option is to take the crop elsewhere.
It is such a pain in potato growing, during communist times it was used as a propaganda piece. There was (very likely fake) news that US was dropping that beetle from spy planes to ruin the crop. Of course the association of the beetle with one of the US's states didn't help.
Another way to deal with such infestation is to pick it up by hand and lots of people did that back then and now. You can imagine how unpleasant that is. Also you end up with 5l jars full of these bugs...
When I was growing up, in eastern Europe, we had a small potato plot and every few days during the growing season, we would go to the plot, scrape the little red eggs from the leaves, and hand-pick the larva and adult beetles, then crush everything with our feet. I'm guessing this wouldn't scale too well for larger producers, but seemed to be working well for us.
The brought-in-for-some-purpose, escape-to-bush, become-feral, become-pest worked also for cats, dogs, horses ... up-to camels.
I am not aware of Australian Feral Elephants but it may exist.
Would it help to switch crops around between plots or would these beetles stay in the ground for years even if they couldn't find any potato plants to feed on?
There’s a general rule in amateur gardening that you rotate the location of your potatoes on something like a 4 year schedule. In wider agriculture you’re looking at “crop rotation”. I don’t know how this affects specific beetles etc.
It depends a lot on how poor one was. Some had extreme diets of potatoes and milk or buttermilk with rare variations. Others incorporated oats and other vegetables and meat when they could afford it. But the best stuff was taken for sale in Britain.
Imagine 6-12 lbs potatoes and a cup or two of milk, day in, day out!
Selective breeding of potatoes started in the beginning of the 20th century; growing potatoes long to be very large increased the risk of crop failure due to blight (and other problems).
Given that, combined with the lack of modern farming equipment/resources, I think it's fair to say that the average farmer didn't come close to eating 6000 calories a day. Even at very high energy expenditure levels, that would bump you way over a 100kg bodyweight.
It’s one thing to have a bad crop. It’s another to have your government enforce some heartless economic system at the expense of people’s lives, and utterly fail at helping them by accepting foreign aid from other countries.
Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much later famines in the Bengal regions[4] were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat.
Irish Potato Famine was exacerbated a lot by the system of landlords and private property protections.
Bengal Famine was largely exacerbated by Churchill’s policies that heavily favored the British at the expense of people on the Indian subcontinent. And of course the entire British Raj came about through state capitalism (the British East India Company getting the empire’s support and appointing governors).
> the much later famines in the Bengal regions...entire British Raj came about through state capitalism
There is an interesting thread of history in the earlier 1770 famine in Bengal.
The EIC over-taxed during the famine, leading to "a large proportion of the dead [being] spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food" [1]. Dead spinners produce no textiles, which caused the Company losses. That crashed the stock and--together with a short squeeze in EIC stock and ensuing pan-European banking panic--prompted Britain's first modern credit crisis [2]. That, in turn, required a bailout from the Bank of England and, among other assistance, the Tea Act in 1773 [3], which, together with images of the EIC's ruthlessness in Bengal, caused the Boston Tea Party [4] which kicked off the American Revolution.
Thanks for sharing this! I didn’t realizs the connections… just like I didn’t realize that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis because Cuba wanted to defend itself against the US “special military operations”, and made an alliance with USSR. Not at all dissimilar to what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. Anyway, I like making these connections across disciplines — at the time the people reacted exactly to these things.
DOES ANYONE KNOW OF A BOOK THAT COVERS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES IN THIS WAY?
The vast majority of ways science is taught, we just learn the shrinkwrapped version. I want to know how they finally figured out the mind was in the brain vs heart, how they got past spontaneous generation, humors, phlogiston, who was a proponent of luminiferous ether after the michelson moey experiment, and more importantly… how did they discover molecules and the atom, what did they know before they had electron microscopes… how did they use the older, worse theories and how did they eventually discover these new concepts like tectonic plates etc
did Popov and Marconi and Tesla know each other… in short how did science develop? Any books like that?
I think 'Cosmos' the TV series (old and new ones) is the best 'popular' version of such a history.
The thing that I think you are overlooking though is that Tesla and Marconi and Popov were not required to invent radio and modern electronics. There is a reason why a lot of groundbreaking inventions get invented by different people in different places at around the same time. Look into 'multiple discovery theory'[0].
This is a very interesting chain of events. All European exploitation was cruel and history was written by victors. With China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge. Right now, history is heavily tilted towards the western story.
> with China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge
None of this was hidden. American political, British financial and Indian geopolitical history are just rarely taught together.
India and China have no paucity of cruel and exploitative histories. Both contain periods of empire building, ethnic cleansing and wrenching inequality. A better takeaway is recognizing the common impulses our economic and political systems cause in us and how they may be foreseen and mitigated.
For example, the history I just recounted followed the Seven Years' War, in which the British (among others) beat the French and Spanish (among others) [1]. (This also circles back to Paris backing the American revolution.) At the time, the Spanish dollar was the world's reserve currency and Britain a rising power. Guess how they framed their rise and predecessors' fall?
(Unnecessary aside: and they were right. The British I mean. My Indian descent obliges familiarity with British atrocities on the subcontinent and abroad. But at least we, with a competent government led largely by those descended from the indigenous at the time when the British came, can name them. She scale and continuity of the Spanish crown’s atrocities and exterminations show no such delineation nor legacy. And on the next turn, my American citizenship obliges familiarity with our illegal invasions and proliferation of war crimes. But at least we label them as much. In the time of the British Raj and America in the Philippines, that was business as usual.)
From what I understand, the Spanish conquistadores were far more brutal than the British, who were in turn more brutal than the French, who actually befriended the natives and gave them horses.
Having said that, most people die from “mundane” things like influenza and famines, and not necessarily cruelty. Those are the things we all have to try to prevent the most.
It was more mercantilism than capitalism. The same ism that resulted in the American Revolution in which one set of mercantilists overthrew another set. Capitalism was arising at the time but was not yet ascendant.
Well, I am talking about the enforcement of private property of the landowning class, landlords and middlemen extracting rents for them — quintessential parts of Capitalism. And the Whigs explicitly going for laissez faire and attributing the famine to laziness — are not unlike the Republicans today, though today we have far more safety nets for everybody!
> the Irish Potato Famine and the much later famines in the Bengal regions were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat.
Interesting, tell me more about how the economic system in Britain caused the famine in Ireland.
Ireland was a colony of Britain. The economic system of Britain was much more concerned with extracting value from its colony than it was in caring about the people in its colony.
Sure but how did it benefit them to let their "crop" die of famine? Seems like a stupid thing to do, even if you don't care about the well being of your "stock".
Potatoes were not the crop of the rich British landlords, they cared little for the Catholics who they regarded as breeding out of control.
During the years prior to the famine the landlords pushed more and more people from the best lands for failure to pay rent, grew more grain, raised more sheep, shipped these back home to England and watched the Irish starve more and more as their population tripled(? IIRC - it grew by a lot).
Few things about the former British administration of Ireland (or indeed of Scotland, Wales, or Northern England; the UK has never gotten the hang of regions even in modern times - before it left the EU, 7 of the 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe were in the UK) would lead one to assume competence.
In reality it was the last straw after decades of English landowners pushing a rapidly increasing local population further and further into the weeds and denying access to traditional lands and their resources.
"The Irish Question" had been debated at length and from afar in the British houses of Parliment for years prior, and there were a number of small famines before the big crop failures that saw millions displaced.
It's another in a common pattern of invaders colonising a country resulting in dire outcomes for those already there.
During the famine, Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid of the Ottoman Empire offered £10,000 to the Irish people to help ease the suffering. Queen Victoria intervened and requested that he reduce the donation to £1,000 since she had only allocated £2,000 herself.
And to add the complex icing to the complicated cake, Yeats was Anglo-Irish, from a family that had come over as part of William of Orange's forces during the 17th century Williamite vs. Jacobite war.
(Technicality trivia - he was born in Sandymount, which wasn't part of Dublin until the 1930s)
Eh, that's probably pushing the technicalities too far. Sandymount was part of a a separate administrative region until the 30s (in much the same way that, say, SDCC is today), but for practical purposes it was part of Dublin, and it was contiguous with Dublin; I'm pretty sure even in the mid to late 19th century you could walk from the city centre to Sandymount without leaving the urban area.
Haha true. And AFAIK, pretty much everyone in Éire/Airlann has a bit of Viking in them, those buggers were very happy to mix it with the locals.
Which, funnily enough, kinda mirrors how the Irish diaspora tended to interact with indigenous cultures they encountered. They were far more likely to get along with and settle down with locals than the English, who looked down on at that sort of thing.
A friend's Great-Great-Great-Grandad was one such, came out to NZ as a sealer, fell in love with a local wahine, ended up living on an island the local chief had designated for Europeans married to Māori. [0]
And a Māori tribe in the North Island is known for the tendency for the occasional child to be born red headed / blue eyed, thanks again to open-minded local ladies, and open-minded visiting Irishmen.
Thus my comment. I am glad it can help people realize that people’s governments, economic systems and the way people organize through a crisis can play a huge role — to mitigate a major crop failure or to massively exacerbate problems.
English-based land owners of massive agricultural holdings in Ireland were literally exporting huge quantities of food from Ireland at the same time that people were starving.
There actually was a net shift from export to import. The problem was that the country lacked the infrastructure to prepare wheat and oats for human consumption. Even fish were traditionally used as fertiliser rather than as food.
Not exporting potatoes, but just about everything else. Potatoes were just about the only crop Irish peasants produced that their landlords weren't interested in, and the only source of meat was pigs as pork and bacon weren't particularly popular in 19th century Britain, they can effectively live on anything, are good foragers, and do less damage than goats when foraging.
Ireland was the UK's breadbasket and even to this day, the UK has a high dependency on Ireland as a source of food. That didn't stop during the Great Famine: Ireland was still producing immense amounts of food, but due to the Corn Laws and other trade restrictions placed on Ireland by the UK, there were very few mills to turn grain produced in Ireland or imported into something usable.
Sure. The entire system that exacerbated the problem was of a thoroughly capitalist character. It revolved around the landlord class vs the poor tenants / sharecroppers, as well as exporting food at a time of famine (as did Bengal famine).
You’d do well to start in the wikipedia article that I linked. Some quotes:
Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism[15][16] and single-crop dependence.[17][18] Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, in part because they believed the famine was due to lacking moral character,[19][20] and only resumed later. The refusal of London to bar export of food from Ireland during the famine was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land.
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Landlords and tenants
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During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.[36]
Catholics, the majority of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these absentee landlords lived in England. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export[15]—was mostly sent to England.[16]
…
The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie, or mitigating tradition of paternalism as existed in Britain, as the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that supplanted the Gaelic aristocracy in the 17th century was of a different religion and newer. In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that "confiscation is their common title".[39][40] According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever.[39] The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.[39][a]
The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[36] They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[36] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.[41][42]
As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose.
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Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[38]
Tenants and subdivisions
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See also: Irish farm subdivision
A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine (National Library of Ireland)
The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that when a tenant died, his land should be divided equally between his sons. Population growth, from about 2 million by 1700, to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[43]
It's true they weren't awarded land to the order of some 240 sq km each as the British upper class lords were (who admittedly may have been German | Dutch | etc.).
Buuuut they did partake of grain and meat taken from Irish fields and sold to the British public.
Or am I reading the flow of commodities incorrectly here?
It's relevant because if 99.99% of British people had nothing to do with the famine, saying that "the British" were a "pathogen" is somewhere between weapons grade bullshit and outright hate speech.
It was a low effort joke and not meant to be taken seriously, certainly not as hate speech. I also didn't expect it to get this many upvotes. I regret posting it, but I cannot delete it anymore as people have already responded.
That being said, most often when someone refers to "the <population name>", it refers to the country itself / its government, not every single citizen in that country, and that's how it was intended here.
> Who voted for governments that enforced the Corn Law?
Not "the British people", if that's what you are implying.
Until the Reform Act of 1867, only a tiny fraction of British adult men (and none of British women) had the right to vote.
The average Briton during the Great Irish Famine had as much influence on the British government as the average Irish person did. Which is to say, none at all.
> Before the Act, only one million of the seven million adult men in England and Wales could vote; the Act immediately doubled that number.
1/7th isn't that tiny. 1/14th is a fair tiny fraction if we're including disenfranchised women.
Being fair, the Corn Law wasn't intended to hurt the Irish, it was meant to protect British farmers against the cheap grain of the traitor colonies in North America.
But it was British/Anglo-Irish civil servants who enforced it in the face of obvious famine.
And it was a British government that refused to revoke it in the face of obvious famine.
Shit, ol Robert Peel, the creator of the 5-0 in Britain, the origin of two slang words for the Police (bobbies, peelers) had to vote against his own party to repeal the Corn Law.
Anyway, point is, the British government, the government that claimed to represent all the peoples of the United Kingdoms, their policies caused this famine, whether by explicit action, or failure to act.
You can't really #notallbritish this.
It's not like the British government of the 1800s was a police state cracking down on dissenters like it's Saudi Arabia and you're a dominant noble family aligned with the Wahabbi.
And, as I asked earlier, when the great majority of the Black and Tans were British, is it still a tiny fraction of Britain that was keeping Ireland down?
> The average Briton during the Great Irish Famine had as much influence on the British government as the average Irish person did.
They had far more influence than the average Irish person. For starters, they weren't Irish.
You really can. The working class Brits have probably been more screwed over than anybody else in the world by the British ruling classes.
In times when they had no or little electoral input into the policies enacted by their oppressors elsewhere it's perfectly reasonable to call out the flaws in generalisations.
Well you can also have average Americans who think they have no business taking responsibility after it happens, since it wasn't something that concerned them, and nothing ends up done in response to it happening. Or you can note that some people did horrible things under the banner of your country and accept it as such, vowing to never let it happen again and holding those directly involved in the decision to account for what they did. Being upset that someone said "Americans committed war crimes in Iraq and calling it hate speech" is definitely not that.
