Thread: The Irish famine - an insight

I only know this topic casually and have had a bit of a flick around the internet, so anybody who wants to correct an error of fact can feel free to do so, but my impressions as the relate to the discussion thus far are as follows:

While lasseiz faire policies might have been held responsible for the failure to act once the food shortages commenced, the actual causes of the famine were more to do with Europe-wide crop failures and more importantly the dispossession of the best Irish land by English landholders. The landholders were booting the Irish off their land and growing beef and grain for an increasingly wealthy Britain, which only let the Irish farm on marginal land to which potatoes were suited. Even those who stayed had no incentive to improve their land, as they could be booted off at any time. Had the Irish had property rights lasseiz faire policies would not have been a problem ... they might have used their land to grow beef but they could have used the proceeds to gain a greater share of Europe's diminished crop and to import grain from the New World.

It is a very similar situation to what exists in the Horn of Africa at the moment. People who live hand to mouth in a subsistence lifestyle, who don't have property rights and who can't accumulate capital can't access the insurance pool against crop failure that is global trade in food. I'd say the mechanism of the Irish famine was imperialism and a lack of property rights before Laissez Faire.

The blame for this seems to get pinned on the "English" or the "British" like they were a homogenous entity. They weren't. For a start poor people in industrial revolution-era Britain were pretty hard done by themselves and there wasn't the level of education and communications technology that we have now. It is pretty harsh to hold people whose families had only been booted off their own land a couple of generations earlier by the enclosure laws and who were eking out a living in a factory for ridiculous hours, responsible for the plight of other poor people who in those days were actually quite a long way away. It is like blaming the Irish convict settlers in Australia for participating in the subjugation and genocide of a number of aboriginal groups. As much as we like to think we wouldn't participate in such a thing, I doubt that anybody here has faced the prospect of starvation. Such conditions aren't conducive to empathy I think.

The British establishment was a different story, there were people in it that just didn't care about the Irish or anybody in fact, stereotypical aristocratic English bastards of Flashman mould. Still, there were humane voices in the establishment against the eviction of the Irish cut from the same cloth as the abolitionists who were active at the time. My impression is that the famine came on so quickly that these people couldn't act in time to save those lives.

Bigfella, regarding the comparison with the conditions faced by slaves, I would suggest that a slave was considered too valuable allow to starve to death. So, while the poor Irish were allegedly free to do what they wanted, including leaving if necessary, many just couldn't afford to do so starved. Some freedom.

One question to anybody who knows ... I'm interested to know where the Catholic Church, the biggest church in the World, was at this time when it came to helping one of it's most loyal group of followers?

Originally Posted by Aussiegunner

Bigfella, regarding the comparison with the conditions faced by slaves, I would suggest that a slave was considered too valuable allow to starve to death. So, while the poor Irish were allegedly free to do what they wanted, including leaving if necessary, many just couldn't afford to do so starved. Some freedom.

I'll leave your defence of lasseiz faire policies for now, except to say that your qualifications see a wee bit desperate. Even taking into account all the preexisting conditions, different policies at the time that could easily have been adopted would have led to different outcomes, most likely dramatically different.

I will pick you up on slavery, however. You are wrong. I'm not sure if you are simply combining a slavish devotion to economic theory with ignorance, or whether your knowledge of capitalist chattel slavery is largely drawn from the antebellum south. Owners had an incentive to keep slaves alive there because pesky governments had cut off their supply of fresh bodies and might threaten abolition if the butcher's bill got too high (damn their socialist hides!). Things were a LOT different in the carribean. First there was the process of capture in Africa. Then there was the middle passage. Combining these, something like 25%-40% of slaves died before they even got to the auction block - that is millions of deaths already. Thereafter survival rates varied, but on many plantations it was as low as 7-9 years. Indeed, until those pesky socialists began to interfere with the market prices of slaves remained sufficiently low in Jamaica that there was little incentive to breed them. A woman taken out of work for a planting season was seen as a liability & children would not be productive workers for years. Far cheaper to just work them until they dropped & buy in more fresh bodies. This doesn't mean that planters didn't breed new slaves or value some workers, but the logic of the marketplace certainly didn't impell them to do so.

Keep in mind all this was more or less 'normal', not the result of unusual or unforseen circumstances. The very process of the slave trade functioning normally produced large numbers of excessive deaths. Natural disasters & plagues produced even worse outcomes. Also keep in mind that flight was rarely an option. Slaveowners didn't starve their property to death, but they frequently worked it to death or placed it in conditions where disease did the work. Looking at the facts I would much rather take my chances with the limited freedom given to the Irish than the protection afforded by being someone's property.

Now, this little detour has probably wandered far enough from the subject at hand.

Originally Posted by Bigfella

I'll leave your defence of lasseiz faire policies for now, except to say that your qualifications see a wee bit desperate. Even taking into account all the preexisting conditions, different policies at the time that could easily have been adopted would have led to different outcomes, most likely dramatically different.

If you are suggesting that by shipping enough food (funded through charity or by the government) to Ireland when the extent of the food shortage became apparent or by banning food exports, that the famine in Ireland might have been avoided, I am inclined to agree with you - though in the context of a Europe wide food shortage it might have just shifted much of the problem elsewhere. My post was more about separating the short and long term causes of the famine.

Sure, a failure by the British Government or by others who might have helped (like the Catholic Church? I'm still interested to hear about where they were), to act when it became apparent undoubtedly made the problem worse.
However, I still contend that free markets in the presence of appropriate property rights are the best way to prevent these problems occuring in the first place. If you want somebody more credible than me for an opinion on that, do a bit of reading on what Craig Emerson has been saying lately, as you know he's a PHD Economist who has been involved in trade policy for over 20 years, is our trade minister and is in your party. I doubt that he will be defending socialism over lasseiz faire any time soon, not if he remembers that it starved multiples of the number of that died in the Irish famine during the 20th century.

Originally Posted by Bigfella

I will pick you up on slavery, however. You are wrong. I'm not sure if you are simply combining a slavish devotion to economic theory with ignorance, or whether your knowledge of capitalist chattel slavery is largely drawn from the antebellum south.

Now now, I specifically said that my knowledge of the content of this subject was casual and invited people to be correct me if they knew more. Thankyou for your contribution and I take your point that slave's lives differed from place to place, but I don't think I said anything that justified you calling me ignorant or slavishly devoted.

Originally Posted by Bigfella

Owners had an incentive to keep slaves alive there because pesky governments had cut off their supply of fresh bodies and might threaten abolition if the butcher's bill got too high (damn their socialist hides!). Things were a LOT different in the carribean. First there was the process of capture in Africa. Then there was the middle passage. Combining these, something like 25%-40% of slaves died before they even got to the auction block - that is millions of deaths already. Thereafter survival rates varied, but on many plantations it was as low as 7-9 years. Indeed, until those pesky socialists began to interfere with the market prices of slaves remained sufficiently low in Jamaica that there was little incentive to breed them. A woman taken out of work for a planting season was seen as a liability & children would not be productive workers for years. Far cheaper to just work them until they dropped & buy in more fresh bodies. This doesn't mean that planters didn't breed new slaves or value some workers, but the logic of the marketplace certainly didn't impell them to do so.

Keep in mind all this was more or less 'normal', not the result of unusual or unforseen circumstances. The very process of the slave trade functioning normally produced large numbers of excessive deaths. Natural disasters & plagues produced even worse outcomes. Also keep in mind that flight was rarely an option. Slaveowners didn't starve their property to death, but they frequently worked it to death or placed it in conditions where disease did the work.

My knowledge of slavery does mainly relate to the South. However if I am correct your comparison appears to be bit off track. The international slave trade was abolished by the British and US governments in 1807/1808 and affected the Carribean (at least the British bit) at the same time as it affected the South. It was abolished entirely in the British Carribean in 1837, 28 years before it was stamped out in the US, so perhaps you might be comparing different supply and demand conditions during different time periods?

One thing that I do know is that the motivation for outlawing the international slave trade was not motivated by socialism - had Claude Henri de Rouvroy hadn't even coined the term at that stage? Rather the abolitionist movement was driven by enlightened lay citizens and churchmen.

Originally Posted by Bigfella

Looking at the facts I would much rather take my chances with the limited freedom given to the Irish than the protection afforded by being someone's property.

That is obviously a personal value judgement to which you are entitled, thought I would note that plenty of people in the Ancient World sold themselves into slavery rather than starve to death. As you know, lots of parents in the developing world sell their children into sex slavery now in order to feed the family.

Originally Posted by Bigfella

Now, this little detour has probably wandered far enough from the subject at hand.

Comparative analysis is a fairly standard academic technique to shed light on a topic so I think this has been valuable, but unless you or anybody else have anything else to add I'm happy to leave it there.