The Irish Great Famine, Part 2: Causes of the Disaster

2. The Story of the Corn Laws

Government intervention in the export and import of grain has a long history in the island nation of Britain. The Corn Laws we usually discuss are the revised New Corn Law of 1815, but in fact Britain had two major enactments of the Corn Laws, in 1660 and 1815.

Under the Corn Law of 1660, Britain provided subsidies for agricultural exports and imposed high tariffs on imported agricultural products in order to protect domestic producers, and as a result it generally maintained its position as a grain exporter from 1660 to 1765.

Then, after the Napoleonic Wars (1797–1815), agricultural prices, which had remained high during the war years, fell sharply. As a result, through the 1815 revision of the Corn Laws, Britain even took measures to ban imports whenever the price of wheat fell below a certain level.

The problem was that after 1800, population growth and economic growth developed in ways unfavorable to agricultural protection.

Eventually, Britain saw the emergence of the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL), the country’s first nationwide political pressure group, which advocated free trade and argued that the high grain prices maintained by protectionism served only to enrich the landowning aristocratic class.

The biggest obstacle to repealing the Corn Laws was the structure of government revenue. Britain first imposed an income tax in 1842, but even in 1846 it still relied on tariffs for 38% of fiscal revenue, with most of the rest dependent on land taxes. In such a tax structure, measures that reduced the income of the landlord class, which owned the land, were bound to hinder the functioning of government.

As the economic systems of England and Ireland were integrated, and even the tariff system that had protected Irish cottage artisans was abolished in the 1820s, Ireland’s other industries collapsed and its economic structure became even more overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture.

Thus, the Corn Laws—the one and only exception to the laissez-faire policy firmly upheld by the British government—continued to deepen the crisis.

3. Potato Crop Failure Was Everywhere

Potatoes were the food of the poor not only in Ireland but everywhere. There was hardly any food more nutritious than potatoes that could be produced on a small plot of land. For peasants, potatoes were a crop from which nothing was wasted. Potato peels and leftover potatoes were fed to the pigs and chickens raised at home. The manure piled up outside the cottage became fertilizer that enriched the fields.

Ireland was not the only place where potatoes were an important food for poor peasants. The same was true in other European countries, and potato crop failures caused by potato blight also occurred elsewhere. Mass deaths also occurred as a result. It was only that, unlike in Ireland, they did not expand into a massive national catastrophe.

What was different was that there was nowhere else like Ireland, where the landlord class and the peasant class were ethnically divided; nowhere else within a single country had such an agricultural structure become so excessively entrenched; and while some countries may have had agricultural laws focused on banning exports of domestically produced grain, none had Corn Laws like Britain’s that were focused on blocking imports.

4. The Wall of Distrust That Blocked Reform

It was not that the enclosure movement and the four-course Norfolk rotation system were never attempted in Ireland. As livestock prices rose and fast steamships traveling between England and Ireland were introduced in the 1820s, landlords and well-off farmers sought to convert farmland into pasture. However, widespread and fierce resistance from agricultural laborers and tenant farmers who would be driven out because of livestock blocked the introduction of such reforms. A social structure in which the composition of the nation was sharply divided along status lines caused deep mutual distrust, and this hindered the advancement of reforms introduced voluntarily in the private sector. Even after the potato crop failure occurred, this long-standing wall of distrust, together with the fact that most landlords were living in England, became a factor that delayed understanding of local conditions and the response to them.

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Original title: 아일랜드 대기근 이야기2 -재앙을 초래한 원인들

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseo Toron Moim

Date: 2023-08-07

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=2&idx=25930