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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?
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.
> 99.99% of British did not benefit from
which is wrong.
Who voted for governments that enforced the Corn Law?
Drawing ahead in Irish history by 60 - 70 years, who made up the bulk of the Black and Tans?
But sure, can't blame the British for what their aristocracy and elected government did in Ireland, for... ...reasons?
Feel like you need a satirical hashtag, like #notallabsenteelandlords or something.
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.
And I believe the answer to be No, so 'Americans' cannot possibly be responsible under any reasonable definition of responsibility.
That requires having the power to keep it from happening again. Without that, such "vows" are meaningless moral posturing.
We don't do that here.
Second, we did not benefit from what happened there. We did not have lower food prices.