Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)
history.com
history.com
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.
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...
This is incredible! It takes two HN nerds just 5 minutes to come up with a good plan a group of scientists would have needed months to develop.
Usually just the "Colorado Beetle" in the UK at least. Little bastards.
Imagine 6-12 lbs potatoes and a cup or two of milk, day in, day out!
https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-history/food-in-irela...
Colonialism is miserable.
I imagine they may have been much smaller than today's varieties.
Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much later famines in the Bengal regions[4] were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat.
Irish Potato Famine was exacerbated a lot by the system of landlords and private property protections.
Bengal Famine was largely exacerbated by Churchill’s policies that heavily favored the British at the expense of people on the Indian subcontinent. And of course the entire British Raj came about through state capitalism (the British East India Company getting the empire’s support and appointing governors).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Interesting, tell me more about how the economic system in Britain caused the famine in Ireland.
You’d do well to start in the wikipedia article that I linked. Some quotes:
Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism[15][16] and single-crop dependence.[17][18] Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, in part because they believed the famine was due to lacking moral character,[19][20] and only resumed later. The refusal of London to bar export of food from Ireland during the famine was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land.
…
Landlords and tenants Edit During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.[36]
Catholics, the majority of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these absentee landlords lived in England. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export[15]—was mostly sent to England.[16]
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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 Edit See also: Irish farm subdivision
A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine (National Library of Ireland) The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that when a tenant died, his land should be divided equally between his sons. Population growth, from about 2 million by 1700, to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[43]
1844 408,000 tonnes exported; 23,000 tonnes imported
1847 137,000 tonnes exported; 893,000 tonnes imported
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-202289...
Also, for other readers, the trade balance didn't just switch because of dropping exports, imports also rose significantly.
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.
The worst kind of ignorant is the smug one.
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).
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
(Technicality trivia - he was born in Sandymount, which wasn't part of Dublin until the 1930s)
I just like occasionally being technically correct on the Internet, the worst kind of correct.
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.
[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codfish_Island_/_Whenua_Hou
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.
There is an interesting thread of history in the earlier 1770 famine in Bengal.
The EIC over-taxed during the famine, leading to "a large proportion of the dead [being] spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food" [1]. Dead spinners produce no textiles, which caused the Company losses. That crashed the stock and--together with a short squeeze in EIC stock and ensuing pan-European banking panic--prompted Britain's first modern credit crisis [2]. That, in turn, required a bailout from the Bank of England and, among other assistance, the Tea Act in 1773 [3], which, together with images of the EIC's ruthlessness in Bengal, caused the Boston Tea Party [4] which kicked off the American Revolution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_credit_crisis_of_1772–...
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.)
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.
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?
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].
None!
*This is the only known Irish Potato Famine joke.