this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Explanation: While the Irish Potato Famine in 1847 was triggered by potato blight, a fungus-like parasite, the deeper cause of its devastation was the exploitation of the English landlords and the bizarre ultra-free-market policies of the British Empire at the time, leading to English absentee landlords getting richer as their tenants were literally dying, and Ireland exporting food at a time when starvation was rampant.
Steal lands, call it "free market"
classic liberalism
While the land theft was an important component of English oppression of the Irish, I mean in terms of the famine - if the landlords were Irish instead of English transplants, it's unlikely that their behavior would have been significantly different in terms of grain export, unless a feudal or clientistic power structure was retained. The free market, rather than the land theft, is in the core of this issue.
The land theft was fundamental to the famine.
Under the British rule, the Irish were not allowed to own land and had to rent it from a British landlord; more important still, the Irish were not allowed to rent more than a half-acre.
The only crop with a sufficient yield per acreage to feed yourself and have enough left over to pay rent off a half-acre of land, is the potato.
The potato blight hit the entirety of Europe, not just Ireland. Only Ireland suffered a famine. Because the British rule had reduced the options for the Irish to potatoes or starvation.
That's a pretty dire misunderstanding of the situation. The Irish were allowed to own land. The problem was that some 60%+ was in the hands of absentee British landlords, and another ~30% in the hands of Anglo-Irish magnates. Irish were absolutely allowed to rent more than a half-acre - a half-acre wouldn't feed a single person, much less pay rent besides. A fourth-acre was the limit for those seeking relief at the poorhouses.
I mean, other areas in Europe suffered famine conditions in the same period because of the potato failure - Ireland was just hardest hit.
just mocking the concept of coming in, stealing everything, then instituting a free market and claim it is fair.
How is that liberalism? Sounds like colonialism to me.
Liberalism in the sense of a championing of liberal free markets. Extreme property accumulation is generally built on the oppression of past generations, so the idea of a liberal free market being 'fair' because it marks off the (worse) past exploitation as no long acceptable, but allows the extreme inequality that directly resulted from it to continue (and dominate the 'fair' free market), is, at the least, a questionable usage of the term 'fair'.
That's an interesting definition of liberalism. Never heard it before.
It's not a common usage in US English outside of academia.
Yeah I did some searching around and none of the definitions I found are consistent with yours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
its fair because now the markets are free.
Irish people were free to buy food, if only they worked harder.
I think you dropped this: /s
sorry, I assumed the /s was so fucking obvious.
I assumed, but Poe's Law and, well, you know, people are really fucking classist and stupid
I need a comedy, when the most racist person possible, accidentally becomes friends with a leftists group because they all think he's being sarcastic (and he thinks they are as well) and see him as the funniest and smartest person in the group.
the opposite also works.
It also was worse in the fact that the UK had kept food prices up due to various corn laws preventing food importation into Ireland.
Under mercantilism you still export so a feudal system wouldn’t change anything. There would just be less imports
Feudal systems express and store power in different ways than mercantilist and early capitalist systems. Maintaining local loyalties and manpower are important to each feudal landholder, so the intention is generally to ensure that everyone else's lands starve, and, if your own lands starve anyway, ensuring that you and your most loyal men do not starve with them. The kind of absentee landlords that dominated Ireland at the time were not wholly unknown under feudal systems, but would not have made up such an overwhelming proportion of a nation's land, for inability to maintain the necessary loyalties, if nothing else.
This is not to say that the behavior of feudal lords is better than capitalist magnates - only emphasizing that it is different.
A lot of them were Irish who buggered off to London after the Irish lost home rule. Led directly to the collapse of a lot of things.