Ireland was exporting food to England while a million people were starving. Sounds like capitalism to me.
The Act of Union, 1801, annulled the semi-independent Irish
Parliament and transferred political power definitively from Ireland to
London. The effective disenfranchisement of a corrupt Dublin
parliament, and the flight of landowners to London, led to large-scale
social transformations. The large estates were now run by agents, and
these were under pressure to maximise income from rents for the
benefit of absentee landlords.
Many were corrupt, all were committed to the greatest possible
exploitation of the estates and their tenants. One of the consequences
was that Irish agriculture adopted the potato as the staple food-crop of
the peasantry, and economic forces acted to bring about what would
prove a disastrous dependency on a very few varieties.
There were crop failures in the early decades of the 19th century, but
the Great Famine proper came in 1845-1847. Potato blight, borne on
the wind, swept through the land. Whole tracts of countryside were laid
waste. Hundreds of thousands perished. Scenes of unimaginable horror
took place while a complacent administration called for reports and
provided military escorts for grain and meat convoys destined for
export.
A shattered and demoralised people begged for assistance, in vain.
Government raised the inhuman banner of 'Free Trade', refusing to
intervene, and what had been a natural calamity became a holocaust
presided over by an indifferent administration. In the three years
1845-1848 it is estimated that 1 million Irish people died of starvation or
of famine-related diseases such as cholera and typhoid. The country
sustained an economic, political and psychic shock of enormous force -
it is a wound which has yet to heal. http://www.emination.co.uk/commonground/notes/potato.html |
