The Irish Potato famine caused the population of Ireland to drop by 50%. Millions emigrated, over a million starved to death. The cause was a disease that killed the potato plants (potato blight); this disease is favored by cold, wet weather. Europe experienced cold winters and damp summers in the 1840’s (it was also abnormally cold in the arctic-Sir John Franklin’s ships got frozen in to the pack ice and never got free). So, was this famous famine at least partially caused by a cooling global climate?
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age, which lasted from 1350 to 1850.
Relying on a single variety of a staple crop is a recipe for disaster, no matter what the climate.
Of course Ireland is a rich agricultural land, and has always produced an array of food crops and products.
The ‘reliance’ on potaties, for certain classes, was a wholly artificial condition.
Exactly. A tremendous amount of food was exported, primarily to England, throughout the famine.
The Irish potato crop had failed a number of times in the decades before the famine, but it’s theorized like the cause of the blight in the famine was the introduction of a particular disease from the Americas.
Now, whether the cooler weather during those years contributed could be debated, I suppose, but it sounds like the bigger issue was a new, virulent disease attacking the crop.
The Irish meteorological service issues “Blight Warnings”; I’m not sure if that exists in other countries.
Basically it’s not about the prevalent conditions over a whole season. It only takes a single day of humid, calm conditions to allow the leaves to stay wet and the blight to take hold.
So a cool wet summer would be more conducive to the spread of blight but would not be a necessary condition, as most summers in Ireland have some damp days.
Beautiful understatement.
The failure of the potato crop induced food shortage; the application of Progressive, Classical Liberal, libertarian Political Economy caused the famine.
No, the application of Imperialism, specifically British Imperialism, caused the famine.
Not really. Ireland, as a smaller nation, was bound to be taken over by the nearest large neighbour, just as all similar lands are subjugated if possible; such as Navarre, Brittany, Texas, etc… If the large Islands to the east never existed, France or Spain would have conquered Ireland — which was never even a unitary state before the Anglo-Normans began moving in. Calling it ‘Imperialism’ misses the point of a vast and complex series of events.
England treated Ireland very badly oftimes enough; but the landlords who mistreated their peasants were as much Irish as English; and had either the Irish Parliament still been in charge, or an Irish independent nation been looking after it’s own affairs, there’s no reason to believe the Famine would have been handled better — there were famines all over Europe at the period, and English workers died during the Hungry Forties. It’s more a function of economics than power; the Irish aristocracy who would have dominated an independent Ireland at that time would have been no more competent or compassionate than any other.
What doomed the Irish was the application of classical liberal, anti-poor, anti-welfare economics espoused by the UK parliamentarians.
I can make next to no sense out of this repeated claim. Perhaps you can expand it to more than one sentence, including an explanation of how you see “classic liberalism” and “libertarianism” as being congruent components.
Is that true? Ireland is renowned for dairy and beef production, but not, I thought, crops other than root vegetables.
“Classical liberalism” is pretty much libertarianism. It’s a laissez-faire, freedom of the individual, small government type of philosophy. It is not to be confused with what “liberalism” generally means today, which generally refers to “social liberalism.”
Much of Ireland has particularly good peat soil for root vegetables, but it’s a fine land for grains and other crops too. Somewhere I have a book with a reckoning of the volume of grain shipped to England during the famine; it is hard to imagine an independent country making exports like that as its own people starved. Amazing waters for fish, too.
Moderator Warning
Claverhouse, since you’ve received a couple of previous notes or warnings for political jabs in GQ, I’m going to make this another warning. Don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I understand that much, but the rest of the string doesn’t add up - and has been modded to boot. Nev’mind.
The potato also failed in England, although with less effect as the economy was not as reliant upon it. Not for nothing were the times known as the Hungry Forties. Lack of land reform (which came later) caused the famine.
Remember too that the potayto (or potahto) was a vegetable imported in the last few centuries from South America. At the end of the potato road, I assume Ireland grew it’s crop from a relatively small starter population - the classic monoculture. As a result, if one plant was highly susceptible to a blight, they all were; not like wheat, etc. which had centuries and millenia to develop a great genetic variety.
(Plus I wonder if, being root vegetables grown from existing roots, they did not benefit from the level of mixing you would get among wind-pollinating mixes of grass seeds like wheat?)
Classical liberalism and libertarianism both agree that the best solution for most problems can be found in the exercise of a free market. When the Irish potato crop failed, some people suggested government action like sending subsidized food to Ireland or laws restricting food being exported from Ireland during a famine. Opponents argued that measures like these would be interference with the working of the free market and would just make the problem worse.
In a sense, they were right. In the absence of government intervention, the free market did reach a solution - eventually enough people in Ireland either died or fled (over a third of the population) that the remaining population fell below the reduced feeding capacity.
Apparently so. The Wikipedia article on the Famine notes: