Bad Years

I’ve been thinking about other bad years; for instance, those between 1845-1849 in Ireland.

Ireland, it is estimated, had a population in 1845 of around 8 million – a figure that would not be achived again in more than a century. The mass of the population consisted of poor laborers and smallholders. They survived, to an astonishing extent, on the potato. It was the staple – the potato was to the Irish household what steak, potato, veggies and desert are to the  the contemporary American household. The economy was largely agricultural, and the cash crops – grains, for instance – were exported to England.

The potato blight was brought to Europe from the U.S. It started in Belgium – which in all during this period suffered perhaps as many as 40,000 deaths – and spread to Ireland.

Ireland, at that point, was “joined” to the UK, but was in reality ruled as a colony. In the 1840s, in England, the new theories of free trade and non-state interference – old style liberalism – had come to dominate all right-thinking thought. Before, in Ireland, there had been food shortages, but they were met with state intervention, the hiring by the state of a labor force, the stocking of supplies and their distribution, etc. But by the 1840s, this kind of thing, the long noses of the Oxford intellectual and ministerial assistant looked down at these relics of barbarism.  

Ciara Boylen, in her chapter on the famine in Princeton History of Modern Ireland, has a good summary of the British response to the starving to death – or, really, famine fever, typhus, and other of the horrible messengers of  death.

”Despite some very notable examples of intervention, in general the response of the state to Famine relief was characterized by a reluctance to interfere in the Irish economy. The circumscribed level of state intervention has been explained by reference to a complex nexus of opinions, tenets, and doctrines, the most im-portant of which were an adherence to the assumed dictates of classical political economy, in particular the doctrine of laissez- faire; a providentialist belief that the Famine represented an act of Divine will; prejudicial views on the moral failings of Irish landlords and tenants alike; and a perception that the Famine represented an opportunity to accelerate economic and social regeneration in Ireland. Repeatedly aired concerns over the sanctity of the operations of the free market were voiced alongside warnings that a country already suffering from a severe want of industry and self- reliance might be corrupted and debased even further by the provision of gratuitous and profligate relief. As such, it was not merely the objective laws of the market that had to be obeyed, but the particulars of Irish conditions.”  

These reactions, in the aftermath of the Irish famine, did not fill the pundits, thinkers, and state actors who had them with shame and remorse. Rather, they congratulated each other on a dirty job well done. Coinciding with the famine, the large landholders started a campaign of evicting their tenants, and expanding the business of exporting grain and cattle. After the famine, there was a twenty year stretch where famine in the British empire was mostly uncommon, until the first of the great Indian famines struck in the 1870s. 

As Mike Davis shows in his invaluable book, The Victorian Genocide,  the British rulers of India acted according to the same rules, valuing the economy first and blaming the enormous losses of life – the one in the 1870s took an estimated 13 million lives. Lord Lytton, the half mad  Viceroy of India,decided in 1877 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s crowning as the Empress of India by staging a weeklong banquet in Delhi that entailed 68,000  meals for British officials, maharajahs and satraps, the most expensive meal in the world, according to the newspapers. In the meantime, in labor camps where the British grudgingly herded starving Indian peasants, the food allowance for adults was one pound of rice per diem, without anything else – no proteins, no veggies, etc. It provided less calories than were enjoyed by the inmates of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp.  Interestingly, the officials sent out into the “field” all believed the famine reports were exaggerated. No need to panic, and probably an excuse by lazy Indians not to work.

Bad years, bad policies. Yet I – at least -see every connection between this variety of Anglo liberalism – the liberal terror famine mindset – and the response of the Anglophone countries to the corona virus. The same notion that this was all exaggerated. The social Darwinism. The placement of a free enterprise system above everything else. The maximum incompetence, which is generated not by incapacity, but by the refusal to build capacity. 

As it was, so it shall be – is this the law to which we must bow down? Or is there, perhaps, a better way?