Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Desperate: An image of a family home during the Irish famine from 1845 to 1850, in which more than a million people died. hose who think the British Empire was a benevolent, light-spreading enterprise — and an industry of historical apologists has sprung up in recent years — should read the accounts of Ireland’s “Great Hunger”.
It reminds us that imperialism is built on ideas of racial hierarchy and generally entails violent coercion. When the blight fungus arrived from America in 1845, two-thirds were living on potatoes, with adults eating up to 7kg a day. Trevelyan, the niggardly chancellor Charles Wood and the Whig prime minister John Russell firmly believed that, left unfettered by the state, the market would deliver.
The role of private trade was exalted as paramount — despite the lack of shops and distribution networks in Ireland’s most neglected and famine-afflicted counties. After the partial dearth of 1845 came two years of total crop failure, when potato plants “as black as tar” produced tubers that collapsed in a foul-smelling pulp.
Trevelyan must have known that only eight Poor Law unions had more than £3 600 in hand; while the debts of the remaining 122 stood at £250 000. Woodham-Smith writes that in County Mayo in the destitute west, there was one dispensary for 366 000 inhabitants. In Cork, 102 boys lay in a ward with 24 beds. Hunger, disease, evictions and the dreaded workhouse fuelled the gathering torrent of emigration to the New World and to the west coast of Britain, much of it in unseaworthy “coffin” ships.
The £8 million disbursed by the treasury in relief over five years was a tenth of the British government outlay on the Crimean War. Critics pointed to the £20 million paid in compensation to former Caribbean slave owners.
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