HY 150 BISK
WAGES OF NOT MODERNIZING: IRELAND
http://users.ju.edu/hy150biskireland.htm

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POPULATION EXPLOSION IN EUROPE
The pressure of increasing numbers and rural poverty was more severe in Ireland, than anywhere else in Europe. Although Ireland supplied many workers for factories in Britain, Ireland itself did not industrialize in the 19th century. Its fate could have been that of much of Europe’s if not for the Industrial Revolution.

The drama of industrialization runs alongside the drama of rapid population growth. Europe’s population began growing after 1720, leading to severe pressures on available resources and overpopulation in many areas. Large numbers of people had serious difficulty growing or buying the food they needed. There was widespread underemployment, acute poverty, and constant migration in search of work.

All these forces operated during and after the era of the French Revolution. Europe had roughly 140 million people in 1750, 188 million in 1800, and 266 million in 1850—an increase of almost 40 percent in each half-century. Overpopulation worsened between 1800 and 1850 on much of the Continent, most noticeably in Flanders, parts of Scandinavia, and southwestern Germany.
1. One result was migration from the countryside to nearby cities and towns, where unskilled laborers were already irregularly employed and poorly paid.
2. Another result was that growing numbers of peasants liquidated their small and inadequate landholdings and went abroad.
Thus in the early 19^th century, especially in the hungry 1840s, many German and Swedish settlers tried their luck and skill on prairie lands of the American Midwest.

The pressure of increasing numbers and rural poverty was most severe in Ireland. Although Ireland supplied many workers for factories in Britain, Ireland itself did not industrialize in the 19th century. Therefore, although Ireland was an especially oppressed and exploited nation, its fate could have been that of much of Europe if not for the Industrial Revolution.

IRELAND’S GENERAL CIRCUMSTANCE
A. ENGLISH PROTESTANT LANDLORDS
Late 18th-century Ireland was a conquered country. The great mass of the population (outside the northern countries of Ulster, which were partly Presbyterian) were Irish Catholic peasants, who rented their land from a tiny minority of Church of England Protestants, many of whom lived in England. These absentee Protestant landlords lacked the improving zeal of their English counterparts. They knew they were perched on top of a volcano that erupted periodically, but they were content to use their powers to grab as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

B. POVERTY
The result was that the condition of the Irish peasantry around 1800 was abominable. The typical peasant family lived in a wretched cottage made of mud and could afford neither shoes nor stockings. Hundreds of shocking accounts describe hopeless poverty. Sir Walter Scott, for example, wrote: "The poverty of the Irish peasantry is on the extreme verge of human misery. Their cottages would scarce serve for pig styles even in Scotland. Their rags seem the very refuse of a sheep, and are spread over their bodies with such an ingenious variety of wretchedness that you would think nothing but some sort of perverted taste could have assembled so many shreds together."

For one French traveler, Ireland was: "pure misery, naked and hungry. . . . I saw the American Indian in his forests and the black slave in his chains, and I believed that I was seeing in their pitiful condition the most extreme form of human misery. But that was before I knew the lot of poor Ireland."

Yet, despite these terrible conditions, population growth sped onward. The 3 million of 1725 reached 4 million in 1780 and doubled to 8 million in 1840. Between 1780 and 1840, an additional 1.75 million men and women left Ireland for Britain and America.

C. CAUSES OF OVERPOPULATION
The population of Ireland grew so quickly for three reasons:
1) extensive cultivation of the potato;
2) early marriage;
3) ruthless exploitation of peasants by landlords.

1. POTATO CULTIVATION
The potato, first introduced into Ireland in the late 16th century, was the principal food of the Irish peasantry by the last years of the 18th century. The reason for dependence on the potato was originally the pressure of numbers, which forced the peasants to wring as many calories as they could out of a given piece of land. But once peasant began to live almost exclusively on potatoes, many more people could exist. A single acre spaded and planted with potatoes could feed a family of six for a year, whereas it would take at least two and probably four acres of grain and pasture to feed the same number. Moreover, the potato was not choosy and could thrive on boggy wastelands.

2. EARLY MARRIAGE
Needing only a potato patch of an acre or two for survival, Irish boys and girls married much earlier than did their counterparts in rural England and France by the end of the 18th century. Setting up housekeeping was easy, for a peasant could slap together a cabin of mud and stone in a few days with the willing help of the young couple’s neighbors and relatives. They could easily get a mat for a bed, a chair or two, a table, and an iron pot to boil potatoes. To be sure, the young couple was accepting the life of extreme poverty that travelers and people of good conscience lamented. They would literally live on potatoes—ten pounds a day every day all year long for the average male—moistened with a cup of milk if they were lucky.

3. EXPLOITATION OF PEASANTRY
Nonetheless, the decision to marry early and have large families was reasonable, given Irish conditions. The landlords, not the peasants, owned and controlled the land. Because the English leased the land only for short periods on uncertain terms, peasants had no incentive to make permanent improvements. Any increase in profits went to the landlord, and anything beyond what preserved the peasants from absolute starvation the landlord extorted from them. Poverty thus being inescapable in rural Ireland, peasants preferred to share it with a wife or husband. Children were a precious asset, as in many poor countries today, for there was no welfare or social security system, and an infirm or aged person’s best hope of escaping starvation was a dutiful son or a loving daughter.

III. POTATO FAMINE
A. SUBSISTENCE ECONOMY
As the population continued to grow, conditions became increasingly precarious.
1. The peasantry depended on a single crop, the size of which varied substantially from year to year.
2. Peasants cannot detect potato failures in time to plant other crops, nor can they store potatoes for more than a year.
3. Furthermore, a potato economy is a subsistence economy
It lacks a well-developed network of roads and trade capable of distributing other foods in time of disaster. From 1820 on, shortages in the potato crop became increasingly serious. Disease in the potato crop was becoming more common, and the accompanying fever epidemics that struck the population were growing more frequent. Some great catastrophe in the near future was almost inevitable.

B. GREAT FAMINE
In 1845 and 1846 and again in 1848 and 1851, the potato crop failed in Ireland and throughout much of Europe. The general result was high food prices, widespread suffering and social unrest in Ireland, which was furthest down the road to rural overpopulation and dependence on a disease-prone plant, the result was unmitigated disaster—the Great Famine. Blight attacked the young plants, the leaves withered, and the tubers rotted. Widespread starvation and mass fever epidemics followed. Cannibalism occurred, and although starving people generally lived on the carcasses of diseased cattle, dogs, horses, and herbs of the field, in some places, people died with grass in their mouths.

C. LOSSES
Total losses were staggering. Ireland’s population was roughly 8 million in 1845, and without the famine it would have reached 9 million in 1851. But that year, Ireland’s population was only 6.5 million. Fully 1 million emigrants fled the famine between 1845 and 1851 (2 million left between 1840 and 1855), going mainly to the United States and Great Britain. Thus at least 1.5 million people died or went unborn because of the disaster.

D. ENGLISH REACTION
The British government’s efforts at famine relief were too little and too late. Moreover, the government continued to collect its taxes, and the landlords continued to demand their rents. Landlords evicted tenants who could not pay and broke up or burned their homes. Famine or no, Ireland was still the conquered jewel of foreign landowners.

E. DEMOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION
The Great Famine shattered and reversed the pattern of Irish population growth. Alone among the nations of Europe, Ireland’s numbers declined in the 19th century, to 4.4 million in 1911. Ireland remained a land of continuous out-migration. It also became a land of late marriage and widespread celibacy, as the landowning classes discouraged potato farming and converted much of the country into pasture for cattle and sheep. After great population decline and untold suffering, Ireland found a new demographic equilibrium within the framework of a poor pastoral economy.

IV. RELEVANCE AS CASE STUDY
The fate of Ireland has real relevance for an understanding of the Industrial Revolution. The rapid population growth without industrialization that occurred in Ireland between 1780 and 1845 occurred elsewhere, too—in central Russia, in eastern Germany, and in southern Italy, to name only three crucial regions. In these areas, there were indications of acute poverty and overpopulation, and the potato played a crucial role as it had done in Ireland. In Prussia, for example, annual potato production grew from 1 to 11 million tons from 1815 to 1860. By 1850 in some parts of Europe, bread was a luxury; workers and peasants were subsisting almost entirely on potatoes. In 1500, the average German had eaten about 200 pounds of meat a year; in 1850 his counterpart ate about 40 pounds. The standard of living was declining. Other Irelands were in the making.

Population growth threatened to produce a morass of rural poverty, a demographic catastrophe, or both. Because of this, the Industrial Revolution was the salvation rather than the curse of England and of the parts of Europe fortunate enough to follow England’s lead. The alternative to the revolution in energy and industry would probably have been sooner or later, disaster.

For fun, look at:
International Potato Center
http://cipotato.org/

JOURNAL 9 QUESTIONS

After reading the material above, answer the following questions in your journal.
1. What was Ireland’s relationship with England in the 19^th century? To what extent were the English responsible for Ireland’s adoption of the potato and for the crop’s failure? How did this relationship lead to the Potato Famine? More generally, what is the relationship between foreign oppression, underdevelopment, over population, poverty, and famine? What is the nature of subsistence farming? Monoculture? What are their perils?
2. If it is true that the Industrial Revolution "saved" England from Ireland’s fate, what implications does this claim have for the underdeveloped world today?

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