Due the Irish potato famine in the nineteenth century , many Irish died and millions were displaced or themselves migrated to England, Scotland, Australia and North America. According to great economists like Amartya Sen the Irish famine was much less natural and much more artificial. The number of affected people dying due to this famine could have been prevented if the British government had treated them as humans and not as burden.
The book titled “ An essay on the principle of population”of a then British economist Thomas Malthus greatly influenced the government. Malthus said that increased food production catalysed the population, which eventually caused societal problem as there were too many people and not enough food to feed them and poverty and famine were the ultimate results. So in the nineteenth century “ Malthusian model were adopted by many European intellectuals . They focussed on overpopulation and made them basically think of famine as nature reducing population to a sustainable level. But in reality Famine is usually not the result of" too little food " but of unequal distribution of resources and exploitation.
Ireland too was a colony of emerging British capitalists and Britishers viewed them as lazy, barbaric and barely as humans. They captured best of their lands and extracted best of their resources in order to aide them in becoming the wealthiest country in the world. This ruthless treatment made Ireland incredibly poor, their population majorly consisted of peasants, the majority of all houses were huts made of muds, their only food was potato, only beverage water ,a bed or a blanket was a rare luxury and the land on which those peasants lived on was owned entirely by absentee English landlords who demanded exorbitant price as rent.
They took control of best of their fertile lands and used it to produce beef for the domestic English market. Since all their fertile lands were in captivation, the Irish settled for a versatile crop and made it their staple food since it can even be grown on a bad soil. Though potato was adaptable but it was also unreliable. But unfortunately in the mid 1840's a problem began to emerge, potato blight a highly contagious pathogen travelled from North America and ruined crops across Europe. This specifically affected Ireland because it's population was more dependent on potatoes than elsewhere.
To be continued…
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