Being proud of colonialism

[AnotherEffingOrangeRevel]

Perhaps it's no wonder that we let our government get away with continuing to screw over other parts of the world for spurious, often covert, reasons.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people-are-proud-of-colonialism-and-the-british-empire-poll-finds-a6821206.html

The context was not only Cromwell's actions, and subsequent plantations, herding Irish people into the poorest land so the most fertile land was held by British landlords.

But it was also subsequent Penal Laws that made it illegal for Catholics (i.e., almost all the Irish poor) to own anything more than small tracts of land, and forced land to be divided equally between children on bequest. So a family with enough land to feed 4 kids with a variety of grain and veg would then have to be divided in 4 when the parents died. And this smaller plot of land would be further subdivided in the next generation, and so on. Eventually, people owned such tiny plots of land that the potato took over as a staple crop because it provided the highest calorific yield per square foot.

And these landowners of handkerchief-sized fields were the lucky ones. Those without land were denied any security of tenure as landlords retained the legal right to boot them out at no notice. Again, the poorest tenants were stuck with the potato for their own food because of its high calorific yield per square foot, even though they might have been growing grain or other veg that had to be given to the landlord in rent. (And they wouldn't risk not paying the landlord his due, or they'd be instantly homeless).

It was this long history of systematic disenfranchisement by British lawmakers of the vast majority of the Irish people that brought about large-scale famine when blight hit the potatoes crop. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

geeka - "It was a disaster waiting to happen."

It certainly was. I come from a farming family and the risk of potatoe blight is so severe that growing potatoes for seed is strictly regulated by law in the UK even now.

It was a disaster of Govt policy from start to finish and that was compounded by the inadequacies of the welfare system that prevailed at the time ('the Poor Law') and the general social attitudes that would be abhorrent today.

One of the problems of looking at historical facts through modern eyes is that we apply the rules of modern society in judging the actions taking when those modern rules did not apply.

As I said earlier in this thread famine in rural England was not at all uncommon in Victorian times. Poor people in early Victorian Britain had grim factory conditions to contend with but the rural poor had famine.

Grrrr.....potato.....potatoe!

Abetadad but even through contemporary eyes, the Penal Laws of the 17th and 18th century Ireland were viewed as harsh. It's not only retrospective judgement.

To view the circumstances of the Famine as an event of the Victorian era is simplistic, and is to overlook the prior 200+ years of systematic disenfranchisement that created the scale of the disaster. The legal framework imposed by Britain on Ireland created monoculture subsistence farming at a level of scale and poverty that was not present in Britain. The almost total reliance on a single crop was the end result of a population driven to desperate poverty by disenfranchisement and exploitation, the root of which lies in the Cromwellian clearances and the Penal Laws.

The Great Famine in Ireland simply cannot be aligned with local famine conditions in England because the socioeconomic and ideological backgrounds were entirely different, as was the severity and the response to provide relief.

Ireland was not alone in its awful treatment under British (English) rule. The highland clearances in Scotland following the Jacobite rebellion were a similar deliberate disenfranchisement and suppression of Catholic populations. The potato blight of the 1840s also caused many deaths from famine in highland areas already driven into poverty. However, the scale and severity does not come close to equalling that of Ireland.

It sucked to be poor anywhere in the 19th century, but it wasn't governmental ineptitude or mismanagement that made the potato blight so lethal in Ireland. It was years of deliberate policies to remove all political and social power from Catholics that left the Irish population extremely poor and vulnerable. The blight was the tipping point.

The highland clearances in Scotland following the Jacobite rebellion were a similar deliberate disenfranchisement and suppression of Catholic populations.

No they weren't.