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Comment by DrScump | Hacker News Reader

"The worst crop failure of them all would strike Ireland in the 1840s—the potato famine that still haunts that nation’s memory. The United Kingdom responded with the most ambitious program of food aid and cash relief ever attempted by any nation to that point, but one that still fell horribly short of the magnitude of the disaster. "

That's quite a nationalist spin. In fact, England exported far more food from Ireland than it provided in aid of all kinds, even if you don't count the grain consumed in making exported alcohol.

See http://www.usbornefamilytree.com/irishfoodexports.htm or Wikipedia's article for references.

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It is so misleading that it calls the whole thing, book and review, into question.

Yes, the pendulum has swung from "yay, Empire!" to "boo, colonialism" and this book is trying to push it back; but that means we need a careful unravelling of the issues involved, probably attributing them more to the good and bad actions of individual people or groups than trying to answer the single question "England: Good or Bad?"

Denying the role of English capitalist politics in worsening the potato famine is almost as bad as denying the holocaust.

(I'd settle for "England: Not As Genocidal As Belgium")

This was the chap England thought best appropriate to handle the famine.

"The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. - Charles Trevelyan, head of administration for Irish famine relief, 1840s"

He thought the famine would "thin" the population like you would do when maintaining a forest. It's borderline genocide.

I take it this is the same Trevelyan of "Fields of Athenry" fame [1], a great rendition of which can be heard at the end of Veronica Guerin [2]

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Athenry

2 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0312549/

I could add:

Scotland: We tried to have an Empire of our own, but failed.

Amusingly, the organisation that was setup to administer the English bailout of the Scottish Darien colony scheme (one of the main benefits to Scots of the Union) went onto to become RBS which itself required a vast bailout a few centuries later...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

And did the same in Indian during that time period. Having turned Britain's agriculture to wool and much of India's agricultural output to cotton, the British exported food from Indian to feed Britain while 15 million Indians starved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...

The British shot Indians caught trying to steal food from the docks.

Mike Davis is the author who called it "Late Victorian Holocausts" referenced in the article.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/150-late-victorian-holocaust...

Another link on how British engineered the Bengal Famine Genocide in India: http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/

Winston Churchill casually diverted the supplies of medical aid and food that was being dispatched to the starving victims to the already well supplied soldiers of Europe. When entreated upon he said, "Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits." The Delhi Government sent a telegram painting to him a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of people who had died. His only response was, "Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"

Or go back further, to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, where 10 million died in British India because the Brits had replaced too much of the food crop with cultivation of Opium to sell to China. Instead of relief from Britain the locals received aggressive tax collection to make up for the losses due to the famine.

Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.

> Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.

How do the positives and negatives compare to self-governing nations of the same time period? Life in those eras was (to a modern mind) unimaginably cruel, and plenty of rulers plundered their own populations into starvation.

"The United Kingdom responded with the most ambitious program of food aid and cash relief ever attempted by any nation to that point"

"In fact, England exported far more food from Ireland than it provided in aid of all kinds"

Not sure why you'd think these two statements in conflict? Any aid effort would have been pushing against potent forces of capitalism.

In fact, some historians and people think that what Britain did in Ireland in the famine amounts to genocide.

A major contributing factor to the famine was the dependence on potatoes as staple, combined with vast monocultures, the Irish Lumper potato variety in particular. Blight wasn't just an issue in Ireland, but also in the rest of Europe, but it only hit Ireland so hard because there was very little genetic variation. The outcome was grossly mismanaged, but most definitely does not amount to genocide, as the root cause for the potato famine was very much a home-grown problem.

Ironically, some farmers in Northern Ireland started growing Irish Lumpers again, and with modern farming techniques and more variation on the fields, it grows just fine.

The "genocide" portion comes from the fact that:

* Ireland's dependence on potatoes for subsistence was due to forcible appropriation of essentially all arable land by the English government, which redistributed it to absentee landlords.

* Despite clear widespread famine conditions, England continued to export food out of Ireland and maintained an official policy of not intervening in the "free market" of Irish exports, at the documented cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

* Meanwhile the English government did see fit to interfere with foreign aid to Ireland and even actively refused large donations and shipments, allegedly on grounds that it would be insulting to English pride for other nations to do more than England itself.

> England continued to export food out of Ireland and maintained an official policy of not intervening in the "free market" of Irish exports

I know that state economics were coming out of their mercantilist phase; did the English state export food from Ireland, or did English agricultural companies export the food they produced? Those are two very different things.

Nobody is accusing Britain of creating the problem, just of letting it kill far more people than it could have.

The - Let's take all their land... Oops they've starved - thing did help create the problem. See also Tasmania.

An event with an exogenous cause due to ignorance does not qualify as genocide.

I'd go with Daniel Goldhagen for matters of genocide ( or in his parlance, eliminationism.)

Professional historians in good standing do not classify the famine as genocide. The Victorian version of "free market" was just bizarre enough to accelerate the disaster. No explicit or implicit desire to kill people is in evidence.

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