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Marenghi posted:There's a myth that the Irish famine was caused by a lack of food. But at the time crops, livestock and food products were being exported in vast quantities. The potato blight affected many European countries around that time but didn't cause devastation anywhere but Ireland. The gist of this is correct but the economic reality is a little more complicated than that. It had been illegal for Catholics to own land up until a couple generations previous; unsurprisingly land ownership was not widespread, leaving most Irish Catholics to work as tenant farmers. There were virtually no protections for tenants and as Irishmen and Catholics they were legally second-class citizens to begin with, so they were largely helpless to do anything about landlords' attempts to extract as much rent as possible. If a tenant didn't like their terms they could be unceremoniously evicted from their homes, because there were no shortage of starving Irish peasants willing to work under predatory conditions if it meant a chance at food and a roof. Because rents were so oppressive, an Irish tenant's only real hope of being able to meet their obligations was to devote the majority of their time and land to growing cash crops to make rent. Potatoes were the staple crop of choice for the tiny portion of their land they could afford to devote to their own sustenance, because they took so little space and effort to raise. I say "choice", but in reality there was no other feasible option: any time tenants started raising more than the bare minimum food for themselves, landlords would notice and decide this meant they could squeeze more profit out of them, so they'd jack up rents until their tenants were forced back to potato farming out of sheer efficiency. This brutal system is what made the famine so particularly tragic: even as the food they depended on failed, Irish farmers would still be at work harvesting grain to sell to pay the rent. If they sold their cash crops, they'd keep their home but have nothing to eat; if they ate it, they'd be evicted for nonpayment of rent and lose their only means of supporting themselves (and probably wind up in debtor's prison, to boot.)
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Apr 7, 2016 19:34
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 19:16 |
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