The Great Irish Famine: A Trauma of the Age of Liberty That Changed Human History and Intellectual Currents

1. Growth in Crisis

The Victorian era (1837–1901), riding high on the fruits of the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), was for Britain an unforgettable age of freedom and prosperity. Yet even that age of confident hope bore a deep stain. It was in that very period that the Great Famine in Ireland (1845–1852) occurred.

The Great Famine was a major event that killed 1 million people, drove 2 million overseas, and even altered the course of modern history. Since this was also an age filled with religious and moral pride, marked by the abolition of slavery throughout Britain’s territories worldwide in 1833, the illustrations of the miserable scenes reported through the newly developed newspaper media shocked British society all the more deeply. Its aftermath also changed the course of intellectual history and political movements, and for a long time Britain and Western society suffered from the trauma of the famine.

The causes of the Great Famine cannot be explained by any one factor alone. It was a case in which a natural disaster, through the combined effect of many circumstances, spread into a vast catastrophe. Still, we must not forget the process by which England, seeking to suppress Ireland’s independence movement, enacted various laws punishing Irish Catholics and depriving them of their rights (the Penal Laws). As a result, English Protestants became entrenched as the landlord class, while most Catholic Irish were fixed in the status of tenant farmers and agricultural laborers. This matters because natural disasters that develop into great historical catastrophes generally rest on social problems created by human beings. Nor is it a coincidence that Ireland’s government was the most interventionist in Europe.

In terms of the land system, Ireland at the time was divided into three classes: landlords, peasants, and agricultural laborers (the propertyless class, the proletariat). Most of the landlord class were absentee landlords residing in England. Because absentee landlords hired stewards to manage their land, many took little interest in improving it, and vast private estates fell into ruin. Ireland at that time was a land of abundance. Around 1845 it was home to 8 million people, making it the most densely populated place in Europe. Yet it was also a poor land, with 6 million agricultural laborers. Tenant farmers who paid rent also lived precariously, as they could be evicted at any time depending on farming results. But agricultural laborers who did not even have tenancy contracts could survive only by earning wages for five or six months a year, during the potato planting and harvesting season. It is not that the British government made no effort to prevent the inheritance of poverty in Ireland. Under the public education system established in 1831, free elementary education was introduced. However, the Irish language was banned, and students were forced to learn British history instead of Irish history. Educators in the field often rejected this curriculum, and many residents refused elementary education.

Just as Korea once had the spring barley hump, Ireland too had a summer “potato hump.” Potatoes, the staple food of Irish peasants at the time, were difficult to preserve for the entire year. At best they lasted about nine months, and by around May the stored potatoes would be gone, while it was still too early to dig up the new crop—thus began the hungry potato season. Adult men and older boys left home in search of work. It was common for them to go as far as Britain. Women, girls, and young children scraped together meals by gathering wild berries and foraging nettles and wild cabbage. The extremely poor wandered from place to place begging, but influenced by Christian ethics, they were too proud to beg in the same village. There were workhouses established in each district under the Irish Poor Law implemented in 1838, but people generally shunned them. Discipline was strict, and family members were separated and assigned to different quarters. Entry was technically a personal choice, but to leave—or even to go outside—one had to obtain permission. If someone ran away from a workhouse and was caught still wearing institutional clothing, that person could be charged with theft.

It is not the case that Ireland experienced only poverty and depended solely on potatoes from the beginning. Eighteenth-century Ireland experienced both extremes: prosperity and poverty. After enjoying prosperity following 1690, repeated poor harvests from the late 1720s onward changed the structure of society so that poor farmers came to rely heavily on potatoes. In the 1750s, Ireland’s agricultural economy developed rapidly with the opening of the transatlantic food trade. In the 1770s, cultivated land expanded rapidly, accelerating population growth still further. As Britain, whose population was rapidly expanding amid economic recovery, became a grain-importing country, grain prices rose, and this encouraged Ireland to step up agricultural production. More land was brought under cultivation, and after the Corn Laws were passed in 1815, raising the profitability of food production, this trend intensified even more.

-Source

The Black Potatoes: The Story of the Irish Famine - Dolbegae

The Great Famine in Ireland - Sigong Discovery Series

* The “Liberalism Reading Group” Kakao Open Chat and Band group are communication spaces operated by reading group members.

These are not channels operated by the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE),

so please keep this in mind when joining and participating.

▶ Join the Liberalism Reading Group:

https://open.kakao.com/o/g4Nn1uud

---

Original title: 인류사와 지적흐름을 바꾼 자유 시대의 트라우마, 아일랜드 대기근

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseotoronmoim

Date: 2023-07-26

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=2&idx=25912