In the following excerpt from “The Malthus Factor:
Poverty, Politics and Populations in Capitalist Development” New York: Zed
Books, author Eric Ross shows the strong ’ influence of Malthus in explaining
the 19th century Irish Famine. Ross argues that most of these
explanations systematically ignore the structural and institutional
complexities of Ireland and thus the historical context of the making of Irish
poverty and famine. Such explanations, according to Ross, have not only
resulted in the blaming of the poor but t also suggest that the political and
social movements representing them are incapable of improving society.
The Making of the Great Famine
In 1845, most of Western Europe was
hit by Phytopbtbora infestans. Combined with a poor grain harvest in
many parts of Europe, the failure of the potato added to a pattern of agrarian
stresswhich would be a major factor in the riots, rebellions and revolutions
that swept across Europe in 1848.
However, events in Ireland differed
dramatically from developments elsewhere, where, at least, widespread
starvation was generally fore- stalled. In the Swiss canton of Bern, for
example, when a food riot broke out in October 1846, the reaction of the
cantonal government was to acquire food grains from abroad to prevent wholesale
food shortages (Pfister 1990: 283). The contrast between this response and
England's reaction to pending famine in Ireland was due to the fact that Bern
was in command of its own affairs, while Ireland's fate depended on the
interests of a colonial power. Indeed, many of the leading figures in the
British cabinet at the time - including Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary,
and Lord Clarendon, President of the Board of Trade and Lord Ueutenant of
Ireland - were absentee Anglo-Irish landlords (Ridley 1970: 2-4, 321; Ptest
1972: 237; Stephen and Lee 1921-22, Vol. 20: 347-50). And if they were not,
their families often were: the Duke of Bedford, the brother of the prime
minister, Lord John Russell, also owned substantial estates in Ireland (Prest
1972: 238).
Travelling through Ireland late in 1845, as the first potatoes were
beginning to blacken in the fields, Thomas Foster wrote that he was 11 certain
that some steps will be required to be taken to avert the horrors of a
famine" (1846: 328-9). Those measures were never taken. The British government
generally acted as if it regarded the famine as the only effective means of
repressing the rebellion that was then rampant throughout rural Ireland.
Russell, moreover, was especially possessed of "a Malthusian fear about
the long-term effect of relief ", while Clarendon believed that
"doling out food merely to keep people alive would do nobody any permanent
good" (Prest 1972: 271). Except, of course, the poor, whom such
callousness ultimately condemned to death.
The relief programme, such as it
was, was in the hands of Charles Trevelyan, who had been educated at the East
India College at Hailey- bury, "where he had been greatly influenced by
[Malthuss] lectures" (Clive 1973: 318; Stephen and Lee 1921-22, Vol. 12:
886-7; Vol. 19: 1135). His wife, Hannah, was the sister of the historian and
politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose fervent Malthusianism (Trevelyan
1978: 116) had led him to challenge Sadler for a parliamentary seat because of
the latter's anti-Malthusian views. Trevelyan's own forceful Malthusian
attitudes were clearly reflected in his opinion that the famine was "a
direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence" (Trevelyan 1848:
201). His justification for meagre assistance for the Irish was that
posterity
will trace up to that Famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the
habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on
this as on many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom had educed permanent good out
of transient evil. (Trevelyan 1848: 1)
But if Trevelyan thought it was a
divine blessing, the divines thought otherwise. A year earlier, Bishop Hughes
of New York had already written:
they call it
God's famine! No! no! God's fan-tine is known by the general scarcity of food,
of which it is the consequence; there is no general scarcity, there has been no
general scarcity of food in Ireland, either the present, or the past year,
except in one species of vegetable. The soil has produced its usual tribute for
the support of those by whom it has been cultivated; but political economy
found the Irish people too poor to pay for the harvest of their own labour, and
has exported it to a better market, leaving them to die of famine, or to live
on alms; and this same political economy authorizes the provision merchant,
even amidst the desolation, to keep his doors locked, and his sacks of corn
tied up within, waiting for a better price. (Hughes 1847: 21)
Nevertheless the argument that the
famine was God's way of redressing a Malthusian imbalance between people and resources
appealed to a British cabinet dominated by Irish absentee landlords. And, to
the extent that it justified the barest minimum of relief, the argument that
nature must be allowed to take its course also meant that aid would not con-
found the workings of the "market". As a result, one of the most
perverse features of the famine years was that Irish exports - the reason,
after all, that the island was a colony - were not only maintained throughout
the crisis, but actually increased. In 1846 alone, almost half a million pigs
were shipped to England - pigs that in a good year might have been eaten, but
now had to go to pay the rent (O'Donovan 1940: 192). Even the London 7-imes,
which had little visible sympathy for the Irish, conceded that, "while
England was avowedly feeding Ireland ... whole fleets of provisions were
continually arriving from the land of starvation to the ports of wealth and the
cities of abundance" (71mes 1880: 45). Yet this was not widely
appreciated in England, where the famine was simply a dramatic sign of how
catastrophically the Irish had mismanaged their resources and of their failure
to diversify their diet. As a letter-writer to the 77mes remarked:
they inhabit
a country a great part of which is at least equal in fertility to our own, with
more that is capable of being made so. There is no reason, except their own
willful mismanagement [my italics], why
they should not grow as fine crops of wheat as are raised in the Lothians, and,
after feeding themselves, export the surplus to our shores.
(Times 1880: 14)
The real problem was that the food that Ireland was already exporting to
England in such prodigious quantities was not surplus.
Despite massive depopulation as
over two million people died or emigrated due to the famine( O Grada 1972: 154)
- and in spite of increasingly delayed marriage, the "permanent good"
to which Trevelyan alluded never materialised, because the real problem of
Ireland, British colonialism, had not gone away. And, far from leaving
Ireland's future to God's will, Westminster quickly took advantage of the
famine to enact bills which accelerated the very process of land concentration
and eviction that had put rural Ireland at such peril in the first place (Kennedy
1973: 28-9). One of the most notable of these measures was the so-called
"Gregory clause" to the poor-relief act of June 1847, named after
William Gregory, the MP from Cork, who introduced it. This provision prevented
anyone with more than a quarter-acre of land from being considered destitute
and thus able to qualify for poor relief Since many Poor Law guardians, who
were responsible for administering local relief, were also landlords, it was
inevitable that this measure was exploited to force impoverished tenants to
relinquish their holdings (Donnelly 1975: 98;'1995: 159-60).
Through this and other pressures, as
many as half a million people may have been evicted between 1846 and 1854
(Donnelly 1995: 155- 6). The agricultural landscape was dramatically
transformed.
The market in evicted land was
especially brisk during die famine and its immediate aftermath ... The
wholesale clearances of the late 1840s and early 1850s allowed commercially
ambitious individuals to acquire pasture ground at relatively cheap rates. On
many estates the evicted land formerly held by subsistence tenants was
consolidated into large pastoral holdings and relet to graziers and other men
of capital. (Jones 1983: 392)
Between 1845 and 1851, the number of
plots of less than one acre fell from 135,000 to 38,000, while those between 1
and 15 acres de- clined from 493,000 to 280,000 (Steele 1974: 3). Between 1841
and 1901, the percentage of all holdings between one and five acres fell from
45 to 12, but the proportion of those 30 and above rose from 7 to 32 (Kennedy
1973: 89). By the 1870s,
half the country belonged to a
thousand people with an average of around 10,000 acres each. Great and small,
the landlords were, as a body, British, or Anglo-Irish, and Protestant. (Steele
1974: 3)
For decades, the main source of
pressure on the small-scale Irish cultivator remained precisely what it had
been in the years preceding the famine, the expansion of pasturage, only now it
occurred with an unprecedented intensity. The proportion of Irish agricultural
land being cultivated declined from one-third in 1851, in the immediate wake of
the Great Famine, to less than one-fifth in 1881. It had fallen to one- seventh
by 1926 (Kennedy 1973: 91-2), at the time of partition. All this was to meet a
growing demand for beef in Britain, which was reflected in the dramatic price
differentials between grain and meat that characterised the post-famine period:
From a low point in 1850, the last
Famine year, the prices of cattle at the
Ballinasloe October fair, the
"greatest" fair in the west of Ireland, doubled by 1855 and then
continued to rise steadily at an average of 2 pounds per year until 1880 ....
In contrast, grain prices fluctuated wildly after the Famine, wheat prices
being 21 per cent lower nationally in 1876 than in 1840. (Jordan 1987: 326)
Irish exports of cattle rose from
almost 202,000 in 1846-49 to about 558,000 by 1870-74 (O'Donovan 1940), a
development that was facilitated by the establishment of the Irish railway
network in the second half of the nineteenth century Uones 1983: 377). By 1880,
it could be written that
agriculture of most other kinds has
been steadily dwindling down; 519,307
acres out of a total tillage area of
5,500,000 had gone out of cultivation in ten years. 'Me wheat culture was
ruined .... The breadth of land even under oats had declined by 320,000 acres
... 50.2 percent of the entire surface area of the country and two-thirds of
its wealth were devoted to the raising of cattle. (Dublin Mansion House
Relief Committee 1881: 2)
In the province of Connacht alone,
total crop acreage declined from 744,263 in 1869 to 694,708 a decade later,
while land in meadow and clover - a sign of grazing - soared by 30 percent from
200,766 to 262,095 acres (House of Commons 1870: 756-7; 1880a: 848-9). By then,
cattle and sheep graziers, who occupied almost half the land of Ireland, were
the dominant political force in the country (Crotty 1981: 111-13). One of the
worst hit parts of Connacht was County Mayo, where the post-Famine increase in pasture
had been especially rapid.
Between 1847, the first year for which
reliable are available, and 1851 the number of cattle in Mayo rose from 79,148 to 116,930. There
were 173,596 cattle in 1876 and 191,497 in 1900, representing an increase of
142 per cent over the fifty-three years. The number of sheep rose 225 per cent
over the same years. In order to graze this livestock the amount of land in
Mayo devoted to grass, meadow and clover increased from 485,651 statute acres in
1851, or 38.8 per cent of the total acreage of the county, to 595,843 acres, or
44.9 per cent of the total, in 1900. (Jordan 1987: 327)
Because much of this expansion
involved the conversion of cropland and a process of land consolidation, typically
effected through evictions, the result was that many remaining subsistence
cultivators in the most fertile regions of the county were forced either to
relocate in peripheral areas or to emigrate (Jordan 1987: 327-30). As early as
the 1860s, a Poor Law Inspector reported from Mayo that
Amongst the small farmers or
occupiers of land, [deprivation] is everywhere in the barony severe; but in the
electoral districts, already alluded to, I am convinced it is intense. Many
families there are, I believe, utterly without means. The whole of their stock
of potatoes and corn is gone; it has barely sufficed for their own support up
to the present time, and been inadequate for that of their cattle, which have
died of starvation and cold. Such families are now without means of supporting
themselves or cultivating their farms. They find that if they surrender them,
and go into the workhouses, they become paupers for life; and, in most cases,
they will die sooner than adopt such a course. (in Day 1862: 37)
By 1870, the expansion of cattle and
sheep grazing had considerably worsened conditions for small-holders and rural
labouters. In Mayo, where as few as nine landowners owned over one-third of the
land and most were disinclined to rent their land to anyone but large graziers
(Jones 1983: 395), families which still depended on potato cultivation were
under increasing pressure (Jordan 1987: 334; cf Crotty 1981: 111). As cattle
and sheep pushed tillage onto worse soils, not only did total crop acreage
decline, but productivity fell as well.
The pattern of increasing land monopolisation and the expansion of
grazing which spurred it were only a part of the problem, however. By the late
1870s, a great agricultural crisis had embraced much of Western Europe and
severely affected the British Isles. In large part, this was due to horrendous
weather, which made European agriculture espe- cially vulnerable to new
developments in the international market. As Lamb has noted,
The decline of English agriculture, which lasted for fifty years, dated
from this time. The harvests had been affected by difficult seasons from 1875,
and the impact of competition on Britain's free trade market of cheap North
American meat from the prairies was beginning to be felt. 1879 turned the
decline into a collapse. (1982: 245)
The situation in Ireland was
especially grim for the near-landless who depended on the potato, the average
yield of which fell from 4.7 tons in 1876 to 2.0 tons in 1877 (Solow 1971:
121). There was a slight, patchy recovery in 1878, but climatic conditions
worsened the following year and average yields declined further to about 1.3
tons per acre - "half a ton below the last recordedfamine [her
emphasis] year (1872)" (Solow 1971: 122).
One of the
normal safety-valves in times of rural distress, seasonal employment in England
(Kerr 1943; Green 1956: 116; Johnson 1970: 236-8), was limited now by the
general agricultural depression and by increasing mechanisation (Royal
Commissioners on Agriculture 1881: 668), which had significantly reduced
English farmers' demand for Irish labour. At the same time, imports of cheap
and abundant grain and meat from the United States, whose vast interior plains
were being opened up by new advances in long-distance transport (Royal Commis-
sion on Agriculture 1881; Ross 1980: 198-204), were not only filling the vacuum
created by crop failures throughout Europe (Solow 1971: 122-3), but
undercutting local prices. The price of Irish ham in Ireland was actually three
pence higher than that of imported US ham (Sligo Independent 1879: 3).
It is little wonder that 1878 was regarded by some as the least profitable for
the agricultural economy of Ireland for thirty years (Moody 1981: 273).
As a
result, many small and moderate-sized farmers and cottiers were in debt to
merchants and landlords (Moody 1981: 283) and, as few landlords were prepared
to countenance non-payment of rent, the number of "ejectments" rose
nationally from 1,749 in 1878 to 2,677 in 1879. It was an increase of 53
percent in one year. The growing tide of anger and frustration which had been
accumulating since the late 1860s began to be expressed in new forms of rural
protest by the end of the 1870s.
Connacht,
which was the most deprived region of the country, took the lead with 56
percent of all the so-called "agrarian offences" registered by the
constabulary during 1879 and the first month of 1880. Of the 544 cases reported
for that province alone, 36 percent occurred in Mayo, one of the counties
hardest hit by evictions, although it only contained 29 percent of the
province's population (House of Commons 1880b: 286-7, 349). Half of the protest
meetings called within Connacht at this time, to build public pressure -
"agitation" in official parlance - for land reform, were held in that
one county alone (House of Commons 1880b: 292). Not unexpectedly, it was the
home of the land agent for the Earl of Erne, Captain Charles Boycott, who gave
his name to the mass resistance - "boycotting" - which he encountered
when he attempted to evict his employer's tenants (Ellis 1972: 160; Marlow
1973: 13; Taatgen 1992: 170). And it was in Mayo that growing popular
resistance gave birth to one of the most potent challenges yet raised against
English rule in Ireland, the Land League, with its call for land
reform. The challenge was perhaps the greater because, as Crotty
has observed, although the majority of participants in the League were
small-scale cultivators and rural labourers, one of its guiding forces was
actually the graziers themselves, who no longer wanted to put up with "the
sharing of profits from the booming livestock trade with an Anglo- Irish
Protestant elite whose title to that share rested on the increasingly
anachronistic grounds of conquest, confiscation and royal munificence in an
increasingly distant and irrelevant past" (Crotty 1981: 111). To that
extent, the League brought into question the very basis of English hegemony.