C.E Trevelyan on the Irish famine

In his book on the Irish Famine, C.E. Trevelyan quotes from a paper submitted to the Horticultural Society in 1822,

The effect of the unlimited extent to which (the potato's) cultivation may be carried, on the human race, must be a subject of deep interest to the political economist.

It seemed to lift the Malthusian curb on population. Trevelyan, previously a Civil Servant in India before being put in charge of the Irish & later the Scottish Famine, had been a pupil of Malthus at the East India Training College.  

The extension of population will be as unbounded as the production of food, which is capable of being produced in very small space, and with great facility; and the increased number of inhabitants of the earth will necessarily induce changes, not only in the political systems, but in all the artificial relations of civilised life.

In Ireland, you could get a labourer to work for you by giving him a tiny plot of land and a cabin. He could grow enough potatoes to feed himself and his family. Indeed, you could even start charging him rent- or, if you were too lazy, you could get a sub-tenant to do it for you.  What's more, you could start up a factory and get free labour because the cottier, renting his land from year to year, grew his own potatoes. Any eggs or bacon he was able to produce would have to be sold to cover his rent. Eating potatoes alone, he and his family would work long hours in your factory. 

Consider the Ralahine Commune in Ireland founded in 1831. A landlord, John Scott Vandeleur, fearful that agrarian secret societies might spread amongst his tenantry, brought in an English Socialist, Edward Thomas Craig, to create and run a flax factory. Vandeleur soon gambled away his estate and absconded. The experiment ended in 1833. Still, the marvellous potato, which appeared three times as calorific as wheat, must have put the idea of immense riches into the heads of landlords. Your workers feed themselves out of marginal land you own. Whatever wage you pay them, you get back as rent. This is a money making perpetual motion machine. This means the capitalized value of agricultural land is bound to rise and rise.

It must be said, this rosy view was not shared by the Irish poor- or even the class of intermediaries. There was bound to be a month or two of dearth because potatoes did not keep. There was also the folk memory of periodic blights. The problem was that those at the bottom of the heap didn't have the resources to diversify while those above them didn't have the incentive- more particularly after English style Poor Laws were introduced. Firstly, since the landlord became responsible for paying the poor rate for those leasing land for less than 4 pound per annum, the temptation was to evict the small fry. Secondly, those leasing more than a quarter acre were disqualified from receiving poor relief. In other words, there was no implicit risk-pooling or 'moral economy'. Similar problems existed with the incumbered Estate Act. 

The big landlords, absentees more of then than not, didn't care about raising productivity or just keeping their work-force together in bad times. Nor could the intermediary class do any substantial risk-pooling or diversification because any mechanism by which it could be done would be corruptly captured and rendered incentive incompatible. 

Still, there must have been some sort of 'moral economy' amongst the Gaelic peasantry otherwise the fatalities would have been 'front loaded'. In 1845, potato output fell by a third. But the next year it was down by three quarters. The big problem with the potato is that a much bigger amount of seed-potato is required per acre than is the case with wheat. Thus the agony of the Gael was prolonged. 

How far such changes may conduce to or increase the happiness of mankind, is very problematical, more especially when it is considered, that since the potato, when in cultivation, is very liable to injury from casualties of season, and that it is not at present known how to keep it in store for use beyond a few months, a general failure of the year’s crop, whenever it shall have become the chief or sole support of a country, must inevitably lead to all the misery of famine, more dreadful in proportion to the numbers exposed to its ravages.

It appears that almost the entirety of the population growth Ireland experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century was wiped out because of the potato blight. Those who had been dependent on it either died or emigrated. 

Writing of Ireland, Trevelyan could be speaking of the Permanent Settlement in India in the manner in which A.O Hume would soon come to speak of it. 

In Ireland, in 1870, 3 percent of agriculturists owned their own land. By 1929 the proportion, in Eire, was 97 percent. Ireland's refusal to pay the 'land annuity' (i.e. interest on British loans which had allowed tenants to purchase their land) led to an Economic war in the Thirties which, sadly, the valiant Da Valera was bound to lose. This meant continued emigration and population decline till the beginning of the Sixties. 

There are diminishing returns to research on the Irish or Bengali famines. True, official accounts of the period may have kept silent on some things- after all, bureaucrats have political masters- but other accounts are available which give a more rounded picture. This raises the question was the Potato famine 'genocide'? 

Several U.S. states, beginning with New Jersey and New York in 1996, have mandated history textbooks to include the Irish famine as akin to the trans-Atlantic slave trade or the Shoah.  The problem with this view is that it was up to the Irish rate-payer to provide appropriate relief under the Poor Law. Perhaps, if Daniel O'Connell had lived a little longer, a loan could have been taken to ease the burden on the rate-payer. After all, there can be no better investment than keeping hard working people alive and in good health.

It may be that if Ireland had had fiscal autonomy, it would have decided not to borrow so as to preserve its independence. If soo, the Irish famine would have been like the Finnish famine of the 1860s. 

What gives credibility to the charge of genocide is the suspicion  that if the people worst affected had been Protestant rather than Catholic, Westminster would have done much more for them. However, we must recognize that parts of Ireland, in the 1840s, had poor transport infrastructure. The 1879 famine led to far lower excess mortality because railways could transport food very quickly. Moreover, under the leadership of Parnell, the Irish had much better political representation. The diaspora, especially in America, raised vast sums and sent shiploads of food. More importantly, Westminster was finally coming round to the view that a prosperous, peaceful, Ireland required large scale land reform and what we would now call a pro-active 'industrial policy'. Sadly, many in England wanted to keep Ireland poor so as to gain cheap labour. Apparently, it was usual, on English farms to have a room above the stables where the 'hinds' (labourers) slept. A ladder led up to it and the farmer took away the ladder once the hinds had entered it for the night. This was so as to guard against the possibility that the hinds slaughter him in his sleep!