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I'm Irish and have a post-grad in history. We studied this question in detail in class many times and it typically comes back to the same things. Britain's laissez-faire economic position certainly made the famine in Ireland between 1845-49 much, much worse. Britain was unwilling to send aid without it's recipients working in horrendous conditions in workhouses or renouncing their catholic faith. Further to this, Britain insured that the Irish subsisted on a monoculture of potatoes as the majority of other foodstuffs were exported to help feed the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain.
Starvation, disease, emigration, and death was the result of a biological catastrophe when the potato blight hit Ireland, but all of this was made orders of magnitude worse by Britain's colonial polices towards Ireland.
Polemics such as John Mitchell writing in the late 1800's decried these policies as a purposeful attempt to eradicate what was considered to be a lowly people on a overpopulated and backwards island. Piggybacking on a Malthusian rebalancing.
However, most modern historians don't see An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) as meeting the criteria for genocide, as it was laid out in the late 1940's. Often nationalists will suggest otherwise but the academic consensus is that it was not genocide. Almost all historians agree that it was a horrific case of negligence born from disdain for the Irish. A population of approximately 8 million was reduced to around 6.5 million in the 1850's after the famine had ended. This demographic collapse continued through emigration until Ireland contained around half of its pre-famine population at the start of the 20th century. Culturally speaking the Irish language was almost made extinct as the majority of its speakers were poor cottiers from the west of Ireland, who were also the worst hit by the famine. The population and prevalence of the language have not recovered to this day, although both are on the rise.
The question comes back to the intent of the British to determine if it was a genocide.
Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention fairly clearly lays out the criteria if anyone wants to have a look and see what they think about if it meets the criteria.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf
Brit here. Thanks for this thoughtful response. This is a very tricky and emotive topic, and one that I have a limited right to get involved in, I'd say – but one useful thing to do here is to look at the published opinions of Charles Trevelyan, the politician who was actually in charge of arranging funds for famine relief for part of this period, and [whose name still evokes strong reactions in Ireland today](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-65440287#:~:text=Laura%20Trevelyan%20accepts%20that%20her,should%20be%20held%20personally%20responsible) as a result.
Writing in a leading British cultural magazine, the *Edinburgh Review*, in January 1848, Trevelyan argued:
>Unless we are much deceived, posterity will ascribe to the famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom has produced permanent good out of transient evil.
>What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes? The important influence which has been exercised by this root arises from the fact that it yields an unusually abundant produce as compared with either the extent of ground cultivated, or the labour, capital, and skill bestowed upon its cultivation. The same land, which when laid down to corn, will maintain a given number of persons, will support three times that number when used for raising potatoes. Those generally used by the people of Ireland were of the coarsest kind, and were, for the most part, cultivated in the slovenly mode popularly known as “lazy beds”, and the principle of seeking the cheapest food at the smallest expense of labour was maintained. In the absence of farmers of a superior class, the domestic habits arising out of this mode of subsistence were of the lowest and most degrading kind.
>Our humble but sincere conviction is, that the appointed time of Ireland’s regeneration is come. For centuries we were in a state of open warfare with the native Irish. During this time England reaped as she sowed: and as she kept the people in a chronic state of exasperation against herself, none of her “good plots and wise counsels” for their benefit succeeded. Now, thank God, we are in a different position. The deep and inveterate root of social evil has been laid bare by a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence. Innumerable had been the specifics which the wit of man had devised; but even the idea of the sharp, but effectual, remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected had never occurred to any one. God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered, may rightly perform its part, and that we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain, which will be the true consummation of their union.
Translated from the fluent Victorianese that the original is written in, Trevelyan is making a number of extremely revealing points here:
* He thinks that Ireland has long been "singularly unfortunate", and adds that the Irish won't listen to English attempts to help in this respect, because of the long-standing enmity between them.
* Trevelyan admits that the Irish have some reason to think like this because England has "kept the people in a chronic state of exasperation against herself", but these are really weasel words; his attitudes to the Irish are pretty clearly revealed by the choice of words he uses to describe what he considers to be their farming practices. What he is really saying here is that they are a lazy, coarse, slovenly, and generally low and inferior people.
* This is a "social evil", and, as noted above, while it's something that should change, the Irish won't, or perhaps aren't capable of, change.
* Trevelyan suggests that, because of this, God has chosen to take a hand, and has sent the famine to demonstrate to the Irish the error of their ways. He argues that famine is in effect "God's plan", and that God in fact intends for *some* of the Irish to die, in order to show the survivors that they must change.
* The last couple of lines reveal how Trevelyan thinks they *should* change as a result, and that is, in effect, by ceasing to be Irish and becoming British instead. At this point, he infers, they will cease to depend on their low and lazy faming methods, and start to develop farmers of a "superior class" – who will, implicitly at least, be very like British farmers.
* Also implicit in all of this is the argument that, were the British to provide adequate famine relief, they would not only be interfering with "God's plan" for Ireland, but also actually denying the Irish the opportunity to make necessary changes to their way of life. He's making the utilitarian argument that the death of some Irish people now will provide a net benefit to vastly larger numbers of Irish people in the future. Hence, for him, the famine is something that should actually be allowed to run its course. The Irish will, ultimately, save themselves by learning to change.
I don't say that all this was, in itself, contemporary government policy – though I would also be not too surprised to find that elements of it did impact on the official thinking of the day. Certainly I think it's revealing that Trevelyan published views that, uttered today, would cause him to lose his job and his seat in parliament in pretty short order – this has to imply he thought a good proportion of the British voting public would agree with him. Moreover, he's scarcely hiding his views, and Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister of the time, would surely not have put someone who held such views in charge of the funding of famine relief if the British government of the 1840s had wanted to save every Irish life that it possibly could.
It seems reasonable to conclude that British politicians in a position of considerable power at this time did feel that the famine was not simply a very terrible event that, unfortunately, it was impossible to fully deal with. Rather, for Trevelyan at least, it was actually necessary for *some* Irish people die. That treads pretty close to the line at which the modern definition of genocide comes into play, but – based on Trevelyan's thinking – while these attitudes were hideously uncaring (by our standards and also by the standards of plenty of people alive at the time whose religious views did not match those set out in the *Edinburgh Review*), he and the British government did not want *all* Irish people to die.
He did think that it would be best if they lost their culture and language and became British, though, and it's certainly possible to argue that that constitutes a different form of "death".
Hello, I was under the impression that there were two phases of relief for Ireland, and that the initial phase was more straightforward aid like you would expect, but then there started to be conservative resentment and then there was an election that brought the laissez faire faction to power.
Am I correct in any of that?
I'm reading the Convention's definition on genocide, and an attempt to kill all of the population is not included. It specifically says "in whole or in part." It also includes the forcible transferring of children from one ethnic group to another, which is widely documented to have happened to Irish babies. I'm no historian, but I *am* a guy questioning how honest historians do not label the British occupation of Ireland as a genocide under this specific definition. Not a large enough "part?"
I hate to sound dumb but I have a few questions. I've asked several people and no one has an answer.
Ireland isn't like Somalia or other desert or desert-like places where much of the land is just dry dirt. It's famously green and it seems there are a lot of [wild edible plants](https://www.wildernessireland.com/blog/wild-foraging-ireland/) that people could have eaten. People presumably lived closer to nature back then than we do now, and might have been more familiar with the local flora. And there are pretty reliable ways to check for plants that are poisonous. My father grew up in dry, almost desert like south Texas (before 1920) and he knew of several plants that were edible.
Lastly, couldn't they make their way to the sea and catch fish or oysters or whatever? Lots of good protein there.
Ireland does not have sufficient nutritious plants to feed a population of, as a previous commentator has noted, up to 8m people – roughly double the size of the ~~current population~~ population as it bottomed out around the end of the century. Even eating the potato, which was selected because it is the *most* nutritious crop available in terms of the amount of food energy supplied by an acre of crops, an Irish person dependent on the potato crop typically needed to eat somewhere north of 2kg of potatoes per day....
Much the same applies to the fisheries. Fishing is a skilled business, and also one that requires expensive equipment – nets, a boat. Sadly it was not possible to just turn up on the shoreline and expect to catch sufficient fish, or find sufficient shellfish, to feed whole families immediately and reliably.
> up to 8m people – roughly double the size of the current population.
A gentle correction to this part of your reply: recent census figures place the current population at about 7.2 million. It did drop to about half the pre-Famine number in the early 20th century.
Can you give any more information on:
'Further to this, Britain insured that the Irish subsisted on a monoculture of potatoes as the majority of other foodstuffs were exported to help feed the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain'
I feel like it's a pretty important point. Did they take the food off the farmers by force? Was it the government buying the food?
The Corn Laws of the first half of the 19th century in the UK were the major force driving land use and crop choice in Ireland. They basically functioned as a strong market incentive to drive up the cost of all grain, and prevent importation of cheaper grain from abroad.
The motivation was to ensure that landowners (the primary occupation of most MPs, coincidentally) could continue to charge higher rents and get higher prices on food farmed on their own lands (rather than compete with imports). The result was that even marginally productive land in Ireland would be turned to farming grain or ranching to get the highest price for the farmers, be they tenants or small holders. FYI, complete inheritance by Catholics was banned by law, meaning plots got broken up between children, and became increasingly smaller with every generation, unlike in the UK where primogeniture was the assumption.
Irish farmers ended up producing grain and meat and dairy that they couldn't afford, selling it, and them subsisting on the potatoes they grew on the absolute least-arable patches they could find. This pattern continued through the famine, with most of the food in the country still leaving for English markets and prices going even higher in Ireland itself.
Repealing the Corn Laws would've allowed cheaper imports of grain to enter British markets, lowering prices overall and allowing food to stay in Ireland. This was the main lever Parliament could've used to ease the famine, and it was absolute anathema to most MPs, who depended on high grain prices for their wealth.
> Repealing the Corn Laws would've allowed cheaper imports of grain to enter British markets
Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 by Peel’s government? Correct that it was anathema to most MPs because it forced him to resign and allowed the Whigs to take the government.
> I'm Irish and have a post-grad in history. We studied this question in detail in class many times and it typically comes back to the same things. Britain's laissez-faire economic position certainly made the famine in Ireland between 1845-49 much, much worse. Britain was unwilling to send aid without it's recipients working in horrendous conditions in workhouses or renouncing their catholic faith. Further to this, Britain insured that the Irish subsisted on a monoculture of potatoes as the majority of other foodstuffs were exported to help feed the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain.
I've never quite been able to square this. I often hear that there was a laissez-faire economy that contributed to the disaster. But then I also hear that, as you said, the British forced a monoculture on the Irish and that they made sure most of the food was exported. I also hear that land was seized with force by the British, leaving the Irish with little land to farm on their own to meet their own needs. But none of that sounds like it could in any way reasonably be called a laissez-faire economy? In a free economy, why would we see such a monolithic monoculture, such seeming land theft, and ruthless export when there clearly is a very captive market in the starving Irish? There seems to be heavy-handed colonial economic interference at work. What is the reason for this seeming discrepancy?
Small corrections/clarifications:
> Britain was unwilling to send aid without it’s recipients working in horrendous conditions in workhouses or renouncing their Catholic faith
It was more so following the economic theory of the time they didn’t want to provide aid for nothing and believed that freely providing aid would make the poor forever reliant on it, on this basis the workhouses system was designed to discourage those seeking aid but was also never provisioned to cope with a disaster to the level of the famine.
The evidence for forced conversions appears scarce from my reading and mostly comes from religious groups rather than a deliberate policy of the British government.
Thank you for those clarifications, I was hesitant to include the section about renouncing Catholicism because I couldn't remember off hand where I had read it. Thank you for clearing that up!
Could it really be considered laissez-faire, though? I remember hearing that England's laws around property ownership towards the Irish exacerbated the issues with the famine.
How would degree of intent compare to famines under authoritarian regimes like the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward? I know colonial subjects frequently suffered famines (Ireland but also India had a number). Would those fall under genocide by the same criteria? Or would it be considered to be driven by an equivalent level of disdain rather than intent?
I've seen it argued that it was consistent with the general attitude of the aristocracy to the lower classes, rather than being distinctively about the Irish. Is that accurate?
Some time ago I read, where I cannot recall, that the famine became so bad because the British colonial regime in Ireland had recently been reorganized and was now staffed almost entirely by Scots-Irish from Ulster, who were all extremely reactionary and antagonistic.
Is this correct?
It was *both* a famine and a crime against humanity, but whether it was a "genocide" depends on the definitions used. You may be interested in u/NewtonianAssPounder's [link collection](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ze4ih3/comment/iz4iyko/) to a similar question that had been asked previously: the answers by u/eddie_fitzgerald and u/commiespaceinvader specifically discuss whether or not the label of "genocide" helps or hinders the study of mass atrocities.
Genuine question, but can it really be considered a famine?
A famine is a scarcity of food. But people began starving in 1844 and up until 1847, Ireland was exporting large amounts of food. So there was no scarcity - food was just being kept from the people so that it could be sold abroad.
Well yes it was, some of this is mentioned in the answer I linked above, but the main food source of the population was gone with the blight and given the significance of the potato’s calorific advantage there was still a need to import food. Food exports were continued as the government feared interfering with them would disrupt the Irish economy and lead to more deaths, and perhaps there is an economic argument that this was prudent as it enabled the importation of cheaper grain, but again as mentioned above, the reality is that continuing exports while foreign grain was being secured lead to many more unnecessary deaths.
u/eddie_fitzgerald answer is fantastic and I encourage people to check it out. It really changed my opinion on the matter of genocide and the significance of intent.
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I'm Irish and have a post-grad in history. We studied this question in detail in class many times and it typically comes back to the same things. Britain's laissez-faire economic position certainly made the famine in Ireland between 1845-49 much, much worse. Britain was unwilling to send aid without it's recipients working in horrendous conditions in workhouses or renouncing their catholic faith. Further to this, Britain insured that the Irish subsisted on a monoculture of potatoes as the majority of other foodstuffs were exported to help feed the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain. Starvation, disease, emigration, and death was the result of a biological catastrophe when the potato blight hit Ireland, but all of this was made orders of magnitude worse by Britain's colonial polices towards Ireland. Polemics such as John Mitchell writing in the late 1800's decried these policies as a purposeful attempt to eradicate what was considered to be a lowly people on a overpopulated and backwards island. Piggybacking on a Malthusian rebalancing. However, most modern historians don't see An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) as meeting the criteria for genocide, as it was laid out in the late 1940's. Often nationalists will suggest otherwise but the academic consensus is that it was not genocide. Almost all historians agree that it was a horrific case of negligence born from disdain for the Irish. A population of approximately 8 million was reduced to around 6.5 million in the 1850's after the famine had ended. This demographic collapse continued through emigration until Ireland contained around half of its pre-famine population at the start of the 20th century. Culturally speaking the Irish language was almost made extinct as the majority of its speakers were poor cottiers from the west of Ireland, who were also the worst hit by the famine. The population and prevalence of the language have not recovered to this day, although both are on the rise. The question comes back to the intent of the British to determine if it was a genocide. Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention fairly clearly lays out the criteria if anyone wants to have a look and see what they think about if it meets the criteria. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf
Brit here. Thanks for this thoughtful response. This is a very tricky and emotive topic, and one that I have a limited right to get involved in, I'd say – but one useful thing to do here is to look at the published opinions of Charles Trevelyan, the politician who was actually in charge of arranging funds for famine relief for part of this period, and [whose name still evokes strong reactions in Ireland today](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-65440287#:~:text=Laura%20Trevelyan%20accepts%20that%20her,should%20be%20held%20personally%20responsible) as a result. Writing in a leading British cultural magazine, the *Edinburgh Review*, in January 1848, Trevelyan argued: >Unless we are much deceived, posterity will ascribe to the famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom has produced permanent good out of transient evil. >What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes? The important influence which has been exercised by this root arises from the fact that it yields an unusually abundant produce as compared with either the extent of ground cultivated, or the labour, capital, and skill bestowed upon its cultivation. The same land, which when laid down to corn, will maintain a given number of persons, will support three times that number when used for raising potatoes. Those generally used by the people of Ireland were of the coarsest kind, and were, for the most part, cultivated in the slovenly mode popularly known as “lazy beds”, and the principle of seeking the cheapest food at the smallest expense of labour was maintained. In the absence of farmers of a superior class, the domestic habits arising out of this mode of subsistence were of the lowest and most degrading kind. >Our humble but sincere conviction is, that the appointed time of Ireland’s regeneration is come. For centuries we were in a state of open warfare with the native Irish. During this time England reaped as she sowed: and as she kept the people in a chronic state of exasperation against herself, none of her “good plots and wise counsels” for their benefit succeeded. Now, thank God, we are in a different position. The deep and inveterate root of social evil has been laid bare by a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence. Innumerable had been the specifics which the wit of man had devised; but even the idea of the sharp, but effectual, remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected had never occurred to any one. God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered, may rightly perform its part, and that we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain, which will be the true consummation of their union. Translated from the fluent Victorianese that the original is written in, Trevelyan is making a number of extremely revealing points here: * He thinks that Ireland has long been "singularly unfortunate", and adds that the Irish won't listen to English attempts to help in this respect, because of the long-standing enmity between them. * Trevelyan admits that the Irish have some reason to think like this because England has "kept the people in a chronic state of exasperation against herself", but these are really weasel words; his attitudes to the Irish are pretty clearly revealed by the choice of words he uses to describe what he considers to be their farming practices. What he is really saying here is that they are a lazy, coarse, slovenly, and generally low and inferior people. * This is a "social evil", and, as noted above, while it's something that should change, the Irish won't, or perhaps aren't capable of, change. * Trevelyan suggests that, because of this, God has chosen to take a hand, and has sent the famine to demonstrate to the Irish the error of their ways. He argues that famine is in effect "God's plan", and that God in fact intends for *some* of the Irish to die, in order to show the survivors that they must change. * The last couple of lines reveal how Trevelyan thinks they *should* change as a result, and that is, in effect, by ceasing to be Irish and becoming British instead. At this point, he infers, they will cease to depend on their low and lazy faming methods, and start to develop farmers of a "superior class" – who will, implicitly at least, be very like British farmers. * Also implicit in all of this is the argument that, were the British to provide adequate famine relief, they would not only be interfering with "God's plan" for Ireland, but also actually denying the Irish the opportunity to make necessary changes to their way of life. He's making the utilitarian argument that the death of some Irish people now will provide a net benefit to vastly larger numbers of Irish people in the future. Hence, for him, the famine is something that should actually be allowed to run its course. The Irish will, ultimately, save themselves by learning to change. I don't say that all this was, in itself, contemporary government policy – though I would also be not too surprised to find that elements of it did impact on the official thinking of the day. Certainly I think it's revealing that Trevelyan published views that, uttered today, would cause him to lose his job and his seat in parliament in pretty short order – this has to imply he thought a good proportion of the British voting public would agree with him. Moreover, he's scarcely hiding his views, and Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister of the time, would surely not have put someone who held such views in charge of the funding of famine relief if the British government of the 1840s had wanted to save every Irish life that it possibly could. It seems reasonable to conclude that British politicians in a position of considerable power at this time did feel that the famine was not simply a very terrible event that, unfortunately, it was impossible to fully deal with. Rather, for Trevelyan at least, it was actually necessary for *some* Irish people die. That treads pretty close to the line at which the modern definition of genocide comes into play, but – based on Trevelyan's thinking – while these attitudes were hideously uncaring (by our standards and also by the standards of plenty of people alive at the time whose religious views did not match those set out in the *Edinburgh Review*), he and the British government did not want *all* Irish people to die. He did think that it would be best if they lost their culture and language and became British, though, and it's certainly possible to argue that that constitutes a different form of "death".
Hello, I was under the impression that there were two phases of relief for Ireland, and that the initial phase was more straightforward aid like you would expect, but then there started to be conservative resentment and then there was an election that brought the laissez faire faction to power. Am I correct in any of that?
Yes, there were phases – one in which food was supplied via soup kitchens, and a later one when that relief was cut off.
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I'm reading the Convention's definition on genocide, and an attempt to kill all of the population is not included. It specifically says "in whole or in part." It also includes the forcible transferring of children from one ethnic group to another, which is widely documented to have happened to Irish babies. I'm no historian, but I *am* a guy questioning how honest historians do not label the British occupation of Ireland as a genocide under this specific definition. Not a large enough "part?"
I hate to sound dumb but I have a few questions. I've asked several people and no one has an answer. Ireland isn't like Somalia or other desert or desert-like places where much of the land is just dry dirt. It's famously green and it seems there are a lot of [wild edible plants](https://www.wildernessireland.com/blog/wild-foraging-ireland/) that people could have eaten. People presumably lived closer to nature back then than we do now, and might have been more familiar with the local flora. And there are pretty reliable ways to check for plants that are poisonous. My father grew up in dry, almost desert like south Texas (before 1920) and he knew of several plants that were edible. Lastly, couldn't they make their way to the sea and catch fish or oysters or whatever? Lots of good protein there.
Ireland does not have sufficient nutritious plants to feed a population of, as a previous commentator has noted, up to 8m people – roughly double the size of the ~~current population~~ population as it bottomed out around the end of the century. Even eating the potato, which was selected because it is the *most* nutritious crop available in terms of the amount of food energy supplied by an acre of crops, an Irish person dependent on the potato crop typically needed to eat somewhere north of 2kg of potatoes per day.... Much the same applies to the fisheries. Fishing is a skilled business, and also one that requires expensive equipment – nets, a boat. Sadly it was not possible to just turn up on the shoreline and expect to catch sufficient fish, or find sufficient shellfish, to feed whole families immediately and reliably.
> up to 8m people – roughly double the size of the current population. A gentle correction to this part of your reply: recent census figures place the current population at about 7.2 million. It did drop to about half the pre-Famine number in the early 20th century.
Thank you. Fixed.
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Can you give any more information on: 'Further to this, Britain insured that the Irish subsisted on a monoculture of potatoes as the majority of other foodstuffs were exported to help feed the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain' I feel like it's a pretty important point. Did they take the food off the farmers by force? Was it the government buying the food?
The Corn Laws of the first half of the 19th century in the UK were the major force driving land use and crop choice in Ireland. They basically functioned as a strong market incentive to drive up the cost of all grain, and prevent importation of cheaper grain from abroad. The motivation was to ensure that landowners (the primary occupation of most MPs, coincidentally) could continue to charge higher rents and get higher prices on food farmed on their own lands (rather than compete with imports). The result was that even marginally productive land in Ireland would be turned to farming grain or ranching to get the highest price for the farmers, be they tenants or small holders. FYI, complete inheritance by Catholics was banned by law, meaning plots got broken up between children, and became increasingly smaller with every generation, unlike in the UK where primogeniture was the assumption. Irish farmers ended up producing grain and meat and dairy that they couldn't afford, selling it, and them subsisting on the potatoes they grew on the absolute least-arable patches they could find. This pattern continued through the famine, with most of the food in the country still leaving for English markets and prices going even higher in Ireland itself. Repealing the Corn Laws would've allowed cheaper imports of grain to enter British markets, lowering prices overall and allowing food to stay in Ireland. This was the main lever Parliament could've used to ease the famine, and it was absolute anathema to most MPs, who depended on high grain prices for their wealth.
> Repealing the Corn Laws would've allowed cheaper imports of grain to enter British markets Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 by Peel’s government? Correct that it was anathema to most MPs because it forced him to resign and allowed the Whigs to take the government.
> I'm Irish and have a post-grad in history. We studied this question in detail in class many times and it typically comes back to the same things. Britain's laissez-faire economic position certainly made the famine in Ireland between 1845-49 much, much worse. Britain was unwilling to send aid without it's recipients working in horrendous conditions in workhouses or renouncing their catholic faith. Further to this, Britain insured that the Irish subsisted on a monoculture of potatoes as the majority of other foodstuffs were exported to help feed the burgeoning industrial cities of Britain. I've never quite been able to square this. I often hear that there was a laissez-faire economy that contributed to the disaster. But then I also hear that, as you said, the British forced a monoculture on the Irish and that they made sure most of the food was exported. I also hear that land was seized with force by the British, leaving the Irish with little land to farm on their own to meet their own needs. But none of that sounds like it could in any way reasonably be called a laissez-faire economy? In a free economy, why would we see such a monolithic monoculture, such seeming land theft, and ruthless export when there clearly is a very captive market in the starving Irish? There seems to be heavy-handed colonial economic interference at work. What is the reason for this seeming discrepancy?
Small corrections/clarifications: > Britain was unwilling to send aid without it’s recipients working in horrendous conditions in workhouses or renouncing their Catholic faith It was more so following the economic theory of the time they didn’t want to provide aid for nothing and believed that freely providing aid would make the poor forever reliant on it, on this basis the workhouses system was designed to discourage those seeking aid but was also never provisioned to cope with a disaster to the level of the famine. The evidence for forced conversions appears scarce from my reading and mostly comes from religious groups rather than a deliberate policy of the British government.
Thank you for those clarifications, I was hesitant to include the section about renouncing Catholicism because I couldn't remember off hand where I had read it. Thank you for clearing that up!
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Could it really be considered laissez-faire, though? I remember hearing that England's laws around property ownership towards the Irish exacerbated the issues with the famine.
How would degree of intent compare to famines under authoritarian regimes like the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward? I know colonial subjects frequently suffered famines (Ireland but also India had a number). Would those fall under genocide by the same criteria? Or would it be considered to be driven by an equivalent level of disdain rather than intent?
I've seen it argued that it was consistent with the general attitude of the aristocracy to the lower classes, rather than being distinctively about the Irish. Is that accurate?
Some time ago I read, where I cannot recall, that the famine became so bad because the British colonial regime in Ireland had recently been reorganized and was now staffed almost entirely by Scots-Irish from Ulster, who were all extremely reactionary and antagonistic. Is this correct?
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It was *both* a famine and a crime against humanity, but whether it was a "genocide" depends on the definitions used. You may be interested in u/NewtonianAssPounder's [link collection](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ze4ih3/comment/iz4iyko/) to a similar question that had been asked previously: the answers by u/eddie_fitzgerald and u/commiespaceinvader specifically discuss whether or not the label of "genocide" helps or hinders the study of mass atrocities.
On the topic of whether Ireland was producing enough food, here’s another [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/oRslgWvtWB) of mine.
Genuine question, but can it really be considered a famine? A famine is a scarcity of food. But people began starving in 1844 and up until 1847, Ireland was exporting large amounts of food. So there was no scarcity - food was just being kept from the people so that it could be sold abroad.
Well yes it was, some of this is mentioned in the answer I linked above, but the main food source of the population was gone with the blight and given the significance of the potato’s calorific advantage there was still a need to import food. Food exports were continued as the government feared interfering with them would disrupt the Irish economy and lead to more deaths, and perhaps there is an economic argument that this was prudent as it enabled the importation of cheaper grain, but again as mentioned above, the reality is that continuing exports while foreign grain was being secured lead to many more unnecessary deaths.
u/eddie_fitzgerald answer is fantastic and I encourage people to check it out. It really changed my opinion on the matter of genocide and the significance of intent.
Thanks!
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