Posted 2/8/2011 6:28 am
Not that I have any sympathy for the Micks, but the Brits did their best to limit the availability of imported food. The US was the eventual loser in that play.
Posted 2/8/2011 6:28 am : Edited 2/8/2011 6:29 am
For every French ship bringing in food for the relief of the Irish, dozens departed Ireland loaded to the gunwales with food for sale in England. And yet we hear only hints of this genoicide. Ireland is the Emerald Isle, one of the most fertile places on earth. Why eat potatoes when there's grain and dairy products and meat aplenty?
The silence on this crime was so sweeping that only hints were allowed to penetrate into the media of the day. Many scholars feel that Wuthering Heights was really about this collective guilt afflicting the British...but other than that there was little overt mention of it.
"In 1845, Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid declared his intention to send £10,000 to Irish farmers but Queen Victoria requested that the Sultan send only £1000, because she herself had sent only £2000. The Sultan sent the £1000 sterling but also secretly sent three ships full of food. The English courts tried to block the ships, but the food arrived at Drogheda harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors."
that fucking cunt is sucking satan's cock as we type.
Posted 2/8/2011 6:36 am
Asking why the British didn't 'stop' the potato famine is like asking why the Weimar Republic didn't arrest Hitler under 'hate speech laws', an anachronism. The purpose of the early Victorian state was to keep the peace, not feed and clothe and give soapy hand jobs to everyone. Ireland's population was clearly too high in the 1840s, a third starved every winter even before the blight hit.
the british were to blame for the irish dependency on the potato. the british were the ones who owned most of irish land at the time and used it to raise cattle to be sold in britain.
ireland's population would have thrived on an island so given to raising decent crops had it not been for the british oppression.
The British actively interferred with relief in the form of food and seeds. It was a genocide. Mamby-pamby Jew should just shut up. And it was 2 million who starved.
Funny how the most loathesome of all humans hate the Irish, and yet, the Irish have never started a war with anyone or attacked anyone or caused any trouble as long as they were left alone on their lovely little island, and they inbred with most invaders. Jews and Brits are the only ones who hate teh Irish, and in the case of Brits, it's inexplicable.
the population of ireland was over 8 million in the 1840's. so devastating to the island was the famine that it has still not returned to that population.
If Ireland was easily capable of supporting a population of 8 million +, it would have recovered to something near that level, much as populations everywhere have done after innumerable destructive wars, famines and plagues throughout history.
Malthus was right, the population was growing faster than agricultural output which was itself overwhelmingly based on a single crop. England and the Low Countries also suffered the blight but there was no mass starvation. It's a shame it was poorly handled and I suppose a few aristocrats, landowners and merchants are culpable by modern standards, but it's not like 'the British people' were having a great time of it in the 1810s-1850s either.
Bullshit; the native Irish were all jammed into 14% of the land, the worst land, the bogs. Bog soil, peat is acidic and capable of only raising potatoes. When that crop failed they were left to die slowly and horribly. There's no reason for Irish to subsist on potatoes. The other 86% percent of the country was perfectly fertile and capable of producing vast amounts of various nutritious food. Strabo the elder in 400BC stated that the island was so rich that cattle burst open from overeating..
Is that 14% of total arable land or of the total land area of Ireland or what? You realise only a small percentage of Britain's good land was in smallholdings too, right?
Look the enclosure of land and the ejection of small holders and sharecroppers is a pattern of behavior that originated in England itself. Growing lamb for mutton and wool is much more productive of cash and government revenue for a class of country gentry than the old system. The enclosures ultimately resulted in the rise of a huge disenfranchised urban poor that ultimately got shipped off to colonies like Botany Bay. The use of this same system in Ireland made a few people very wealthy and a lot of people very poor. That's 14% of the total land.
Right, so throw into that 86% the land unsuitable for agriculture, moors, forests and commons, inland water, built up areas etc. Those 'great estates' weren't all prime farmland and not all their produce was for export.
I don't have figures for Ireland, but less than a third of medieval England's land area was under cultivation of any sort regardless of ownership - right before the Black Death.
I pulled this map at random off Google Images for part of Wales. It's typical of 18th century land ownership anywhere in Britain but marginal areas.
It's safe to assume 'George Bowen' wasn't tilling all that land himself.
Nit picking aside, as you mention the same process of 'rationalisation' had been inflicted on England in the 17th-18th, indeed had to take place everywhere else during the 19th century that industrialisation occurred. Without a desperate and mobile workforce and efficient downmanned agriculture to supply the cities, we'd still be scratching a living from the land instead of hammering defamatory and paedophilic shit into a redboard.
I guess Ireland too urbanised in a way albeit to foreign cities. What Ireland had that England didn't was a huge die-off due to a catastrophic crop failure at exactly the wrong moment. That was absolutely shitty luck and I don't deny the ruling class' attitude to the Irish meant more people died than had to. But it wasn't deliberate genocide.
Posted 2/8/2011 8:48 am
The brits enabled the Bengal famine of 1943 as well. That killed more indians than were killed in both world wars and was one of the factors that directly lead to independence for India.
This is why Africa's population doubles every generation to the point of total environmental collapse and why when that collapse, either through peak oil, soil depletion or whatever, does finally come, it will be catastrophic far beyond the experience of anyone now alive.
Sometimes in the absence of proper management populations have to correct suddenly, it happened in China about as often as in colonial India until the mid 20th century and it happened in pre modern Europe. They buried the dead and moved on.
