What made the Irish famine so deadly

>which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time, was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency' ...

Now where have I heard that recently

Addicted to basic survival huh. Can't have that.

Was Malthusianism in vogue in the British government back then?

This reminds me of Vladimir Lenin's claim that an important socialist principle is "He who does not work shall not eat" [0].

Just let the people eat dudes.

Also Russell's party during the famine was the Whigs. O'Toole gets that wrong, referring to them as "The Liberals."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...

> Maybe a closer comparison would be famine of 1876-8, where some estimate go as high as 8.6M fatalities on a population of ~58M.

Uh, this is the Bengal famine the parent comment refers to, right? Ireland has never had 58M people in it.

Sounds like an attempt at genocide. Something that has led to billions in reparations for some groups but not the Irish.

> The Irish famine is roughly comparable to other famines of the 19th century in terms of its mortality rate (i.e. Mysore in the 1870s)

Yes, absolutely. But at least for me it was shocking to learn that Ireland, right next door to Britain, was suffering from similar famines to India.

Mortality rate doesn’t paint a full picture of the effect on Ireland. Emigration had a huge effect on the depopulation too. (I don’t think you deliberately left this out or anything just wanted to provide additional context).

There were other crops in Ireland at the time that were exported under armed guard. A lot of the policy was driven by the fact that some British politicians saw the famine as a natural way to ‘thin the herd’ of the Irish populous.

Of course, Houses of Parliament records show that there were British politicians that were morally aghast at this, but unfortunately they couldn’t have enough of an impact.

Its pretty close to the Holdomor in all attributes?

> Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.

Let's not forget Norman Borlaug

> "How in India the Irish Transformed from Colonised to Colonisers"

The Irish people mentioned appear to actually be part of the plantation class of British people who arrived into Ulster. I don't think the framing should be taken sincerely.

You are correct, food was exported outside of Ireland during this time period. This time was called the Hungry 40's and crop failures were happening all over Europe. It lead to the Revolutions of 1848. Food was only available at prices that the poor could no longer afford.

I see why others flagged you although I wouldn’t.

For anyone else who doesn’t know, Ireland was exporting grain and meat during the famine at the orders of the British. They explicitly let the Irish die if someone else could order the food because Free Trade was perfect and if it wiped out a bunch of undesirables to boot, even better[1]

As you had groups with a wildly different wealth as the Ottaman Sultan and the Choctaws on the Trail of Tears scrounging for anything to spare to feed the starving Irish, their British overlords were shipping away food to anyone who could pay them a penny more.

If it wasn’t an engineered genocide then it’s close as you can get to one imo

[1] https://ireland-calling.com/irish-famine-ireland-exported-fo...

The word for it is a man-made famine, much like the Holodomor was a man-made famine.

Mass Murder

The other one being the Australian Aboriginal population?

Ireland produced plenty of good. The Irish could have supported themselves without the British demanding the Irish export food instead of eating it.

Ireland being left to fend for themselves, without exporting to Britain, would’ve also solved the problem.

> I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought.

I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.

Two world wars, and slavery is pretty much all we were taught, unless you specialised.

"modern" immigration was/is much more driven by our former membership of the EU than empire.

Empire is why our friends had Caribbean grandparents. WWII for polish grandparents, and Idi Amin why they also might have had indian parents born in Uganda.

But they were all pretty British to us. They sounded like us, dressed the same.

"modern" immigration when I was growing up was mostly Portuguese and Polish, later more baltics when that opened up to schengen.

But those later countries were also a product of another empire: USSR.

>>the effects still linger on in their former colonies.

The rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the English language, ending Sati etc.

The empire wasn't all good, but was more benevolent than a lot of colonial empires. See the work of Nigel Biggar for reference.

Well, if this is not mentioned at all during history classes, at least it prevents them from being taught that "British brought prosperity and development to all of its colonies, making the world better for everyone" and "they should be thankful that we went there and did all those things, how nice of us, and how rude of them not to thank us again and again!".

My experience in America is largely one of the following:

American person on social media (and, yes, I would claim HN is social media) claims "They never taught us this in school!!!" with many agreeing emphatically.

... and 90+% of the time I remember specifically being taught it. Most people don't remember much of their educations.

The Scots pretty much ran the British empire.

I went to elementary school in Belgium from 1978-1982. I had the sense there was some national pride in having had a major African colony, but maybe Leopold II wasn't a benevolent ruler. Unlike Leopold I or Albert I, who were depicted quite heroically. I didn't learn quite how far from benevolent Leopold II really was until much later in life.

I recently read "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" and it talks in some detail about the atrocities carried out by the Dutch in the spice islands. It isn't something I had been aware of before.

I also wasnt teached about this in school when I was a kid 3 decades afo. My history knowledge came selftaught from nul-tot-nu comics, where colonialism, slavery and holocaust definitly where touched upon. These so called `zwarte bladzijden` (black pages, doesnt translate nicely) are more common in education nowadays after lively debates the last decade(s).

Must be said the knowledge/interest of historical knowledge among my fellow Dutchies isn`t all that great.

https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/slavernij-en-kolonialism...

> figures from article above: percentages of total history subject matter: colonialism 9% Slavery 4 % Holocaust 2 %

The largest german colonial project was based on starving millions of people in Eastern Europe mostly Russians.

I did not hear about in school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

Non-German in Germany. I get the impression that everyone knows that one holocaust very shamefully, but not any of the other ones. Or the one that's happening right now. (In fact, I could get deported for this comment if the police had nothing better to do. Oh well.)

And in New Zealand they also didn't teach us about the way our ancestors holocausted the Māori.

Holocausts happen with alarming regularly in history, and the side doing one usually ends up winning, except, you know, that one time. I wish I understood what factors make people so unable to reason about them or even acknowledge them. Business as usual bias? Ego defense? I think the German teaching that there was only one and there will never be another falls under denial.

The way you can't talk about Palestine in Germany feels like the way you can't talk about Hacker News moderation on Hacker News, except, you know, the life and death of about 6 million Muslims are at stake.

I should have added the context that my secondary schooling was in the 70s and 80s.

This is a reminder why trying to be hip to sell a message is actually very often counterproductive. (See D.A.R.E.)

That Quentin Question video made me cringe from the beginning to the eventual end when I closed it for being insufferable.

Patronizing kids does not hold sway in the long term. They don't stay young. I think it's better to treat them more mature than they are, to speak to the people they become.

The tonal shifts in that video gave me whiplash. Please tell me they didn't give that treatment to the Holocaust as well.

I did history GCSE as well in the mid 90s, and from what I can recall it was only 20th century history. I'm also pretty sure that the curriculum was split into several modules and the school got to pick something like 3 out of N modules to focus on.

Buildings and roads yeah. Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then, this was the time of the New Poor Law (oft called the starvation act) and the workhouses.

Being poor was considered a major personal failing.

As an interesting factoid these sort of mortality figures were not especially uncommon in naval voyages until surprisingly recently. Scurvy is kind of a joke now a days, but it killed millions of people. It was such a big deal that vitamin c is literally named after it - ascorbic acid, or anti-scurvy acid. But that only happened on into the 20th century!

The idea that such a brutal disease could have been prevented by eating fresh fruits and meats sounded more like a folktale than reality. And early experiments to try to demonstrate this were also not that conclusive since vitamin c tends to break down rapidly in the conditions it was stored in (prejuiced - metal containers). For instance during Vasco de Gamma's journey from Europe to India he lost more than half his crew, mostly to scurvy.

And not all that survived the trip across made it much further. Typhoid or "ship fever" was killing a lot of the passengers and when they arrived in North America, they were put into quarantine camps where many died.

If you include Northern Ireland, it's 7.2 million. But it was 8.5 million before the famine; 6.5 immediately after. After that emigration drove that number down. The population size never recovered to pre famine levels.

It's also one of the few (only?) countries in the world whose population is smaller today than it was 150 years ago.

Census data I found is that Ireland has about 7.1 people.

But it also says that the year before the shit completely hit the fan, the Ireland population topped out at 8.18m. 10 years later it was down 1.6m, and another .6m after another 10. And it just kept trending downwards until the 1930's, (4.21m) and bottomed out again in ~1960 before it started growing again.

We may catch 'em on a per-capita basis too, if current immigration, emmigration, and tfr trends continue.

And yet, so few of us Yanks speak it well. Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland.

I did not read it before posting my little quip, no, as I've already read a lot on the subject. My comment wasn't meant as a comment on the article, but on the title, as I thought I made reasonably explicit in my comment..?

Since seeing your comment, I thought oh no, maybe I missed some context or something, so I went and read the article. It's a fine article, but as I expected, nothing new to me.

My guess is that you thought I was posting my cheeky response as a "counter" to the article - I wasn't, and I see the article agrees (in more words, of course) with what I said.

FWIW, your quote doesn't support a food shortage being a cause since it says nothing about the relative change of total planted acreage.

Don’t forget to mention what happened when you tried to get some of that not your food so you could attempt to survive…

I think the evidence says you can have both. When I say 'the evidence' I mean just looking at nature. In nature you clearly see animals and plants that are massively more efficient at tasks than their ancestors all while living in more diverse environments and in larger numbers so clearly you can get both efficiency and flexibility gains. I think though your point has merit but I am finding it hard to write a super clear example of it. Maybe this is because there is a confusion between efficiency and temporary advantage? I think of efficiency more like an attempt to get the maximum infinite gain while a temporary advantage attempts to maximize the immediate gain only. It isn't an efficiency gain if you go out of business in 5 years just so you get a windfall now. With that in mind it is clear that you can create temporary advantages very easily but they may not be long term efficiency gains. Figuring out what is just a temporary gain and what is a long term efficiency gain is hard though. There are no crystal balls to tell you the truth of the future. Diversity in a system means that you will have a lot of different approaches to the problem to try which gives you more of a chance to find the long term efficiency instead of just a temporary advantage.