. said:

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.

http://www.envf.port.ac.uk/geo/research/newport/newport.htm#Landownership

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.

BobHopesColostomyBag said:

When Henry VIII seized all the Church lands in a prearranged quarrel to that purpose he destroyed the entire social welfare system of the Church that those lands supported; orphanages , old folks homes, hospitals...It looks like hundreds of thousands perished when the Church lands were seized and sold off and their inhabitants were ejected into the laneways of what had heretofore been "merry old England", to starve to death and die of exposure.

. said:

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.


/
WE MUST FEED EVERYBODY!

. said:

The Americans will one day soon have a "Great Couch-Potato Famine".
The whole country will run out of salty TV snacks !!

Shiny New Kid said:

The British weren't trying to exterminate the Irish as Hitler was the Jews, or the Turks the Armenians or as in Rwanda.

They were in thrall to theories of market fundamentalism at the time. The idea that the invisible hand of the market would produce the best possible outcome for everyone and it was wrong to interfere with the way the market operated in any way as it would produce a worse outcome.

That's why food was being exported from Ireland even as people starved, because the English could pay more. Its why they interfered with relief efforts. They genuinely believed they were doing the right thing.

Of course they managed to have their little experiment in market forces because, unlike if the English had been starving, starvation and unrest in Ireland didn't threaten their power.

Its worthwhile learning the consequences of market fundamentalism when people preach it as a solution today.

I partially disagree with that; the invading English weren't just any English; they were Cromwell's New Model Army, the Ulstermen of today, the very paradigm of British Israelitism. They saw themselves (seriously) as one of the Lost Tribes Of Israel, they saw the Irish, the native Indians whoever was Philistines, the Roman Catholic Church as Babylon and they believed they had a divine biblical mandate to exterminate the Irish and take their lands. The cold economic science and Malthusianism was/is a kind of rational window dressing on that tribal religiosity..

it's still going on...

BobHopesColostomyBag said:

I partially disagree with that; the invading English weren't just any English; they were Cromwell's New Model Army, the Ulstermen of today, the very paradigm of British Israelitism. They saw themselves (seriously) as one of the Lost Tribes Of Israel, they saw the Irish, the native Indians whoever was Philistines, the Roman Catholic Church as Babylon and they believed they had a divine biblical mandate to exterminate the Irish and take their lands. The cold economic science and Malthusianism was/is a kind of rational window dressing on that tribal religiosity..

it's still going on...

Some of Cromwell's buddies had some fucked up ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Monarchists

"They took their name from a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that four ancient monarchies (Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman) would precede Christ's return. They also referred to the year 1666 and its relationship to the biblical Number of the Beast indicating the end of earthly rule by carnal human beings. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time."

THE RUIN AND UTTER FALL OF ROMISH BABYLON
/

BobHopesColostomyBag said:

I partially disagree with that; the invading English weren't just any English; they were Cromwell's New Model Army, the Ulstermen of today, the very paradigm of British Israelitism. They saw themselves (seriously) as one of the Lost Tribes Of Israel, they saw the Irish, the native Indians whoever was Philistines, the Roman Catholic Church as Babylon and they believed they had a divine biblical mandate to exterminate the Irish and take their lands. The cold economic science and Malthusianism was/is a kind of rational window dressing on that tribal religiosity..

it's still going on...

Hysterical Historian said:

Remember: Henry VIII created his own Church/Religion just to get a particular fuck!

Shiny New Kid said:

Cromwell was 200 years before the Potato famine. If they'd really wanted to exterminate the Irish they'd have done something in the preceding 200 years

BobHopesColostomyBag said:

No, Francis I had sailed up and down the British coast for several summers with a huge navy bearing 70,000 soldiers looking for a bridgehead, preferably to link up with the Scots, sometime French allies.

Henry needed a navy. The English had no navy. So he picked a quarrel with the Pope over a marriage that the church was begging him to allow them to annul. He refused because he wanted a divorce to precipitate a breach with Rome and thus allow him to seize all the Church lands. Those were 1/3 of the lands in England. He immediately sold them to buy himself a navy...

BobHopesColostomyBag said:

Cromwell sold thousands of Irish into slavery to be cross bred with negroes to breed a race of slaves more amenable to agriculture than pure Africans. They were hard at work back then.

Shiny New Kid said:

For sure Cromwell was brutal to the Irish and wouldn't have minded if they all died.

But 200 years later the same ideas were not driving British policy at the time of the Potato Famine

. said:

England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe."[13] Dennis Clark, an Irish-American historian, claimed that the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction..

BobHopesColostomyBag said:

I knew it wouldnt be long until someone mentioned modern Ireland in this thread.

Things have improved a little since the Good Friday Agreement. And there is a lot less terrorism, which is good. Most of the terrorists/para-militaries are now entrenched in gangsterism and organised crime. No longer fighting for a political cause.

England has abused Ireland since day one, much like Israel abuse the Palestinians. Sickening if you ask me.

Its no surprise that the Republicans feel like they have a lot on common with the people of Palestine.


And sadly the Loyalists(supporters of UK in NI) support zionism.


Wouldnt we be better off without religion.

. said:

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.

wasteman said:

I knew it wouldnt be long until someone mentioned modern Ireland in this thread.

Things have improved a little since the Good Friday Agreement. And there is a lot less terrorism, which is good. Most of the terrorists/para-militaries are now entrenched in gangsterism and organised crime. No longer fighting for a political cause.

England has abused Ireland since day one, much like Israel abuse the Palestinians. Sickening if you ask me.

Its no surprise that the Republicans feel like they have a lot on common with the people of Palestine.


And sadly the Loyalists(supporters of UK in NI) support zionism.


Wouldnt we be better off without religion.