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D
Hello, and welcome back to Legacy. Last time we looked at the humble potato and saw how a crop from the Andes changed societies all over the world after its introduction. How it made people taller, it made cities bigger, it reduced conflict in some places, and it helped spur the industrial revolution, no less.
- [00:55]
B
So all sounds like quite good news. But today we're going to look at how it also sowed disaster and profound suffering. And also how potatoes lie behind the growth of the greatest empire of the modern age. So it's a fantastic story. The potato, like we said when we started, therefore it's a gift that keeps giving, even for people who are not that interested in eating potatoes and don't even like them.
- [01:18]
D
It's such a different lens for looking at history, which is so often told not just from a human perspective, but from the perspective of the most elite, well known, often privileged men, historically. So I think it's super refreshing to look at history through the lens of the humble potato. Although it's actually making me laugh, Peter, because you wrote here on my script. Plus, it tastes so good.
- [01:43]
B
I'm still in shortcut work.
- [01:44]
D
If you listen to the last episode, you'll know, and I kept it a secret from Peter to drop it live on the recording. But it does not taste.
- [01:51]
B
So does that mean where we've had lunch and supper together, you've never ordered potatoes? I've never even noticed that. I mean, gosh, my observational skills are not what I thought they were.
- [02:00]
D
Well, I mean, noticing the absence of something is a lot to ask. Also, as my friends will tell you, I'm not immune from pinching a fry off someone else's plate.
- [02:10]
B
Okay, now they look so good.
- [02:12]
D
And I will give the potato that they often look so tempting. It's just for me, the taste doesn't quite deliver the promise. It's just bland, you know?
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B
All right, I'm going to try and convince you again about how important they are in History, even if you. If you're not going to order a cottage pie with a potato topping. From Original Legacy Productions, I'm Peter Frankopan.
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D
I'm Afua Hersh.
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B
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputation that they truly deserve.
- [02:57]
D
This is the Humble Potato, Part 2, the Famine and the Frontier.
- [03:10]
B
So last time we spoke Afwa, we looked through everything. We went through hedges against climate change, food resilience, vitamins, food availability, social stratification and so on. And how important the diffusion of crops around the world are for understanding how people all connected. I mean, lots of global historians, by the way, spend a lot of time trying to think about what does history look like from the perspective of a dog or a sea cucumber? It's not just about human histories.
- [03:40]
D
Are there really historians who specialise in looking at history from the perspective of a sea cucumber theater? Did you make that up or is that really a thing?
- [03:46]
B
It's not just from the perspective of a sea, but to try to remind ourselves that humans, we prioritize our own histories. But there are different ways of looking at things. In the same way that, I don't know, 50, 60 years ago, historians didn't spend a huge amount of time thinking about what history looked like apart from to the rich. That's all changed. So I think there are lots of different ways in which these new perspectives are really exciting. And so seeing crops and roots, I think is quite an interesting one.
- [04:11]
D
And no, no disrespect to the sea cucumber, I did not mean to belittle your research.
- [04:19]
B
We should record live from the bottom of the deep blue sea, clutching sea cucumbers and giving a quick squirt, those ones.
- [04:25]
D
In this weird and wonderful world of academic historians, which, as you know, I love to dive into, especially with you, there's this phrase that gets used a lot that's very relevant to the potato, which is the Columbian exchange. And we really talked about that history in the last episode. But could you just, for people who haven't heard that language before, kind of summarize what we mean by that?
- [04:45]
B
So when Columbus crosses the Atlantic in 1492, the people that follow over the course of the following decades start to bring back lots of things, lots of its extraction. That's what empires all do, whichever period or region. They take things from the periphery, from new worlds, and they enrich the people at the center. And most of the focus is on things like gold and jewels. The things that are taken from the Aztecs and then from the Inca, and then metals like silver that are mined from Potosi in South America. That's the single most important silver strike that supplies most of the world's silver for the next hundred years. But lots of other things cross the Atlantic too. Diseases, for example, but so too do animals. The Spaniards bring with them crops and cattle. I definitely want to do an episode on that, by the way, for, with you about, about some of those legacies of exchanges between West Africa and North America, particular in the early 1500s. But that changes the flora and fauna. So the Spaniards bring with them things like pigs and cows and horses that are not indigenous to the Americas. And that changes not just the ways in which humans travel around, but it changes the soil, it changes the land, it changes the way that the whole portfolio of biota it's called, of different animals. As well as big tasty animals like cows, you get the flies that accompany with them, you get rats, you get rabbits, you get things that transform ecologies. And so that Colombian exchange is used in a neutral way by historians to talk about the things that go backwards and forwards. And that runs from the spectrum of things that have, I suppose, positive outcomes to things that have really negative ones. Because the single most important human commodity, unfortunately, are human beings who are shipped in their millions across the Atlantic to work on the new land, to exploit it in different ways. So the Colombian exchange is a kind of a way of explaining how the Americas fit into global exchange networks from 1492 onwards.
- [06:35]
D
And just thinking about the different food types that were part of this exchange, we're talking about the potato, but there were others. And actually one of them is relevant to me and my personal preferences because cassava is another crop that was brought from South America and became very popular in West Africa. Now, if we're going to talk about a starchy, carbohydrate based root that is edible, I am a much greater fan of the cassava than the potato. And in fact, if you're listening to this and you've never had cassava fries, you are really missing a trick. I don't know why, Peter, but that just does it for me. So much more than potatoes. And actually in, in Central America, it's often called yucca. It's got so many different names because it's become part of so many different food cultures. And it's not hugely different from the potatoes. There's, there's just something about the way it tastes and the way it holds fat when it's fried that I find really delicious.
- [07:30]
B
But you mentioned that both are part of the nightshade family, and nightshade is poisonous. It's very dangerous. So if you don't cook cassava in the right way, if you don't take out the metabolites that produce hydrogen cyanide, then it can cause paralysis, poisoning and even can kill you. So any food that you've got to be careful with has got to taste good, right? Otherwise, what's the point? Why not stick with carrots or something that's maybe a bit less exciting? That process is also one that codifies knowledge. So the people who know how to prepare food properly are empowered. Because, I mean, there's been that very famous case in 2025 about a woman in Australia who poisoned everybody by serving them toxic mushrooms. Dinner party. So, you know, food can be very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. So people who are aware what those risks are and dangers are have very high status because of the gap between life and death.
- [08:21]
D
So this food, knowledge and technology was needed alongside the potato wherever it went. And it's a lot of places because, as we mentioned in the last episode, the potato comes from the Andes and goes all over the world. North America, West Africa, Asia and Europe. And one country in Europe in particular has become synonymous with the potato, both in terms of its status as part of the food culture, but also as one of the darkest chapters of its history. And that country, Peter, is Ireland.
- [08:58]
B
So Ireland gets potatoes introduced around about the end of the 1580s, probably via either Spanish or English ships. We have quite an early reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, who's traditionally credited, although inaccurately credited, with introducing the crop to his estates in County Cork. But we know that by the early 1600s, potatoes are being cultivated in parts of Ulster and Munster, initially in the gardens of the gentry. We talked about that, too, that it was a sort of curiosity. And then more gradually amongst peasants of the poor and. And they're considered a curiosity. But the importance of potatoes starts to grow after Cromwell sends troops over that confiscates lands, ravages the countryside and displaces Irish families, all to become poorer and into the rockier parts of the land in the West. And the fact that potatoes can thrive and do okay in marginal land makes them an ideal subsistence crop for people who've been dispossessed. But let's. Do you study Cromwell AFWA and learn about what he did in Ireland?
- [10:01]
D
Well, I feel like we should actually just take a step back because, you know, as somebody who is so interested in colonialism, I'm always shocked by how little is known everywhere in the world, but especially in the UK in other parts of the United Kingdom, about the history of colonialism in Ireland, even though Northern Ireland is part of the UK and it has been formed as a direct result of this history. So maybe it's just worth setting the scene for people about why somebody like Sir Walter Reilly had large estates in Ireland and what the situation was like on the island of Ireland at the time.
- [10:36]
B
Well, I mean, Ireland is, is seen by most historians as the kind of proto type, the, the place where the English learned how to colonize and develop the practices that then get used in other parts of the world too. So Ireland is a kind of test case is hugely important. But the period we're talking about here really starts with the rebellion of 1641 in Ireland, where many Protestants are killed or displaced. And that becomes a great grievance for English Protestants that feel that those who followed the reforms of Martin Luther, Henry VIII and so on have suffered. And so Cromwell, who has a kind of messianic evangelical streak about him, sees his role, or one of his roles to avenge what are thought of as being atrocities. Ireland's become a stronghold of royalist support after the execution of Charles I in 1649. But his son Charles II is proclaimed king in Ireland in 1649, making this potential base for launching a royalist counter attack against the, the new English Commonwealth.
- [11:36]
D
And I have to say, you know, I made the documentary about statues, which is actually where we first met, Peter, years ago. And I was looking at Britain's relationship with its so called heroes, the men, usually military leaders, who are commemorated in these grand statues around the country. And one of the statues that inspired the most emotion was not Nelson or Bomber Harris. It was actually the statue of Cromwell which still stands in front of the palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament. And so many Irish Catholics told me that the sight of Cromwell still being deified almost at the heart of British parliamentary democracy was deeply offensive and actually traumatic to them. Because this memory of the horrors, the atrocities that Cromwell carried out in Ireland is still really real and a resonant part of many Irish people's identity.
- [12:35]
B
And those campaigns were brutal. I mean, in a letter dated to September 1649, Cromwell describes one of the massacres of a town and island of Drogheda, who says in he's the Action, I forbade them to spare anybody that was in the town. And that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men, you know, we know from contemporary sources that St. Peter's Church was set on fire, people were burnt alive, others were murdered. And Cromwell then writes a letter to Parliament saying, I'm persuaded that this was a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches. He means both Irish and the Catholics. And Cromwell's troops then run through Ireland through the act of settlement for Ireland, 1652, nationalizing, taking away land from Irish Catholics and redistributed to English soldiers and creditors and about 11 million acres. Change his hand. That's about 80% of all the land is in Ireland. Those relocations of Catholic landowners was described as being to hell or to Connaught. People being forcibly located to west of the River Shannon. All the best land in Leinster, Munster, etc, are given to Protestant settlers. And that process of redistributing people as well as taking their land away from them is one of those stories that you know very well AF about colonialism is about transplanting people, moving them, treating them that they are like animals and cattle or they could be redistributed to different locations.
- [14:05]
D
And one of the things that's also very chilling about this English model of colonization is the forensic nature of its execution. You know, this is not just somebody on a rampage killing and seizing land. This is something that is planned over time. And a good example of that is the down survey in 1655, which was carried out by William Petty, in which the English sat down and mapped out confiscated lands, thought in a cool, calm, dispassionate way about how to redistribute them to Protestants. And what they were doing was actually creating formal institutions, a legal and military framework for mass eviction and colonization. And it's this cool, calculated dispossession, theft and oppression that was so perfected in Ireland and that then we did see replicated all over the world, where people were dispossessed of their land for the benefit of the English. And it really does start with this story in Ireland. And we're not just telling the story to bash English colonialism, although I'm, you know, always here for that, because I, I think it's astonishing how little the English, let alone everyone else in the world, knows about this incredibly relevant part of their own history, but it is also the very relevant to the story we're going to tell about the potato.
- [15:24]
B
In Ireland, because it's about distribution of land, it's about access and it's about poverty. So the penal laws from the late 1600s forbid Catholics from buying or inheriting or even leasing long term land, you find dispossessions. They continue through the 1700s. By 1700 or so, Catholics only own about 14% of the land in Ireland compared to 60% beforehand. By 1800 this had declined to about 5%. So there's a huge shift in the way in which the peoples of Ireland are being moved around, being crushed and also being put under pressure. So you find absentee landlords. That's a famous part of what landowning looks like. They're absentee landlords who are based in England who extract rent without investing in local communities. And so you have people like Jonathan Swift in his Drapier letters writing about how profits are just being taken out of Ireland. He said the rents of land in Ireland may be computed whereof one third part at least is directly transmitted to those who are perpetual absentees in England. And that process of oppression, like you said, afwit, it's really important because it's not just about what happens to Irish people, it's about the risk levels that they have where everything they're earning is being handed over to somebody else. And it catched the attention of other thinkers too, doesn't it? Like Karl Marx.
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A
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D
Carl Marx and well, Marx and Engels in their track on Ireland wrote the domination over Ireland at present amounts to collecting rent for the English aristocracy. And Marx was particularly focused on the ecological impacts of the extortionate extraction of rents. In the 1800s, this land clearing, which he wrote, caused an irreparable rift in the social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life. This idea that when you separate people from the land in this way, when you extract value from the land in this industrial manner, you are setting people up structurally for more famine and poverty. And there's no better example of that, probably, than what happened in Ireland in this period.
- [19:05]
B
It's quite interesting, Marx and his views on environmental colonization and capitalism, partly because he's writing both. Of course, his focus on the industrial proletariat, the urban proletariat, but the role that the countryside plays too, and how he picks it in Ireland is important. But those soils in Ireland are considered at the time to be incredibly fertile. In fact, we have an English agronomist called Arthur Young who travels around Ireland in the 1770s, and he notes that per acre, Ireland is more favourable in terms of the productivity that it could have. And this is important because we're heading up towards where there are crop failures and disaster. But in 1800, the separate kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain emerged in the act of Union. And on the 1st of January, 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland are created as a single entity. And that exploitation of people and land intensifies as landlords squeeze for more and more profit.
- [20:02]
D
And so that fertility of the land that you just described, Peter, it's not being used to grow food for people in Ireland. Ireland is now being cultivated as an export colony to make profits for these landlords. So Scanlan writes that in 1846, 3.3 million acres of land in Ireland were planted with grain. Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep, 600,000 pigs. I mean, that's a huge amount for that size of land in that period. And almost none of that food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. If an Irish family slaughtered their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and other offal. Scanlon writes, and he quoted the testimony of a farmer to a parliamentary commission in 1836, that he knew other leaseholders who had not eaten even an egg in six months. We sell them now, he explained. So you can see why Marx leapt on this. I mean, it's a kind of caricature of capitalist exploitation, the excessive greed of a bourgeois class to the complete detriment of everybody else.
- [21:16]
B
And, you know, even Irish farmers with 10 acres, you know, which is not a small holding, would only, and it'd be regarded as quite well off, would only meet at Christmas time. So. And this is where potatoes come in, right? So that spread of dislocations of people displacement to poorer, rockier land means that potatoes ability to thrive, it makes them an ideal crop. They can be grown without animals to plow. So that's, you know, they could be planted with basic tools. So it means you could be poor and you could grow them too. And of course, those yields that we've talked about, how much more valuable an acre of potatoes is than any other crop is really key. And that widespread adoption of potatoes is one of the reasons why Ireland's population goes up so much. So between 1700 and 1841, it rises from about two and a half million to about eight million people. It's fueled by a cheap, nutritious diet of which potatoes are absolutely central.
- [22:11]
D
It's kind of hard to reconcile that this is a massive improvement, but it is. So by the mid-1700s, people in Ireland, the Irish poor, are often eating three meals a day of potatoes, sometimes with a bit of milk, but little else. We're firmly in my food hell now, Peter, although I have to acknowledge that if you're coming from hunger and starvation, this is obviously a step forward.
- [22:38]
B
But it's so by about 1800, Alfred, this is your version of hell. About 40% of the Irish are eating no solid food apart from potatoes. And to put that into context, places like the Netherlands or Belgium, Prussia, it's maybe 10 to 20%, something like that. So routine famine has basically disappeared in potato country. And it means that most people can eat. That's the key part of it. And as well as the fact that Ireland's rural poor are paying landlords in rent and relying on potatoes, their dependence on the land gets divided into smaller and smaller plots, too. The problem, of course, is that although potatoes are a miracle food and are such an important part of Ireland's economy and its agriculture and its diets, it still a monoculture. There's still a problem that you're reliant on a single crop. And if something goes wrong with that, then there's going to be real trouble.
- [23:33]
D
And not just a single crop, but it's the type of potato that's being grown in Ireland. So let's just go back, if you listen to our last episode, to Peru, the indigenous home of the potato. In 1995, a Peruvian American research team found that families in one mountain valley in Peru grew an average of 10 traditional varieties land races, they're called, and in adjacent villages. An environmental scientist found that there were up to 20 landraces in different areas. The International Potato center in Peru has preserved almost 5,000 varieties of potato. The range of potatoes in a single Andean field, Zimmer, Carl Zimmerer, the scientist who did this research, observed, is exceeds the diversity 9/10 of the potato crop of the entire United States. So the Andean potato is not even so much a single identifiable species. It's this huge stew of related genetic entities. In Europe, by contrast, all the potatoes across the whole of Europe are descended from just a few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. And once potato cultivation started to be encouraged on a massive scale. We're getting clones of potatoes, the shoots are being replanted, so you're not even taking seeds, you are cloning existing potatoes. So what you have here is not just a single crop, but a true monoculture, genetically identical plants from the same strain of, of the same crop. And that is the opposite of resilient.
- [25:17]
B
And so these storm clouds are all forming everything. You could see the problems coming. So you've got Disraeli, for example, in 1844, saying that Ireland is a place with a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien established Protestant church and in addition, the weakest executive in the world. Over the first four decades of the 19th century, there are 114 commissions and 61 special committees. The inquire into the state of Ireland and they conclude that without exception, their findings prophecy disaster, because Ireland is on the verge of starvation. Population is rapidly increasing. Three quarters of the labourers are unemployed, the housing conditions are appalling. And you get reports, for example, the Devon Commission in 1845, that say it would be impossible adequately to describe the privations by which they, the Irish habitually and silently endure. In many districts, their only food is the potato, their only beverage is water. Their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather. A bed or a blanket is a rare luxury, and then those relationships with the landlord. So if anything goes wrong and affects the potato crop, then the scale of suffering could be catastrophic, and that is then what happens afterward. Talk us through the origins, the biological origins, of the Irish potato famine.
- [26:35]
D
So everybody's heard of the Irish Potato famine, but you may not have heard of pea infestans. Its full name is Phytophora infestans, which basically means vexing plant destroyer. And that is an appropriate name because this is a type of water mold, sends out tiny bags of spores that are carried on the Wind usually only for 20ft or so, sometimes for up to half a mile. And. And when this bag of spores lands on a susceptible plant, it releases zoo spores. And these zoo spores are like little germs that then breed, sending thread like filaments into the leaf. And they prey especially on the nightshade family. One of the problems about this water mold is that it takes up to five days before it's visible. And then you start to get these purple black or purple brown spots on the leaves of the plant. But by then it's too late for the plant to survive. And it's thought that P. Infestans actually came to Europe from Peru with the guano rush. And we haven't actually talked about guano, Peter, but it's a really important part of this story as well.
- [27:47]
B
That's a legacy episode right there on its own. I've got to make a note of that. We don't. I definitely want to do guano. It's fantastic, amazing story, but. So guano is a kind of nitrate that's incredibly important fertiliser.
- [27:57]
D
It's basically bird pee, right. That's kind of dried over time.
- [28:02]
B
It makes Peru one of the richest places on Earth for a while. But the ships that are bringing guano probably carry this disease. We mentioned the Colombian exchange. It's not just about metals and people and plants. It's also diseases too. It's triggered first. We spot it in the Flanders town of Courtraijk, about six miles from the French border. It in the early summer of 1845. And probably recent DNA sequencing that I've had a look at, which is fantastic. So exciting, the DNA stuff. Probably the outbreak has an Andean trigger and it starts to be transmitted around the world quite quickly. But that blight has reached Paris by August and weeks later it's destroying crops in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. And it's causing government panic in 1844.
- [28:47]
D
Irish newspapers, and still kind of blissfully unaware of the real impact that this is going to have on Ireland, are carrying reports about this disease and how it's attacked potato crops in America and destroyed crops in the eastern us. But it doesn't take long before it hits Ireland and starts to cause absolute havoc. And we now refer to that term as the famine or the potato famine. Sometimes it's called called the Great Hunger. And it's really hard to communicate the absolute devastation that this wart on Ireland, which is now so dependent on the potato, on a single species of potato, and it just gets completely wiped out by this disease.
- [29:31]
B
PETER it reaches Ireland by 1845. And there's a lot of debate today about whether we should call what happens next the famine or the potato famine or the Great Hunger. Lots of historians think that the last is most accurately to be used because it captures the complicated history of the period. But we pick in Freeman's Journal, published in Dublin on 11th September, 1845, it notes the appearance of what's called cholera in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the north, two days later. So on the 13th of September, the Gardener's Chronicle announced, we stopped the press with very great regret to announce that the potato moraine, which is a distemporal disease, has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. And that Mansion House Committee in Dublin receives hundreds of letters from all over Ireland over the course of the next few weeks that ascertains beyond a shadow of a doubt that considerably more than a third of the potato crop has already been destroyed. In fact, by November 1845, it's been ascertained beyond a shadow of a doubt, according to letters, hundreds of letters, coming into Mansion House Committee in Dublin, that considerably more than one third of the entire potato crop has already been destroyed.
- [30:40]
D
I think it's really important, you know, I think the way I learned about the Potato famine, the little I did learn as part of my education, made it sound like this great natural disaster. PETER but there is a really important human and policy element to this crisis because Ireland is a colony, and in England, decisions are being made about what is the best response. And as so often happens when there is a natural disaster, there's also the potential for government to alleviate suffering or create emergency relief. And because of the racialized attitudes towards the Irish, because of the colonial attitudes towards the Irish, because of the class attitudes generally towards the poor, decisions were taken that instead of sparing people from famine, only worsened the situation. And Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, the Assistant Secretary to the treasury, gives us some insight by what he said at the time. That instead of offering famine relief in Ireland, he believed that laissez faire economics would be a better medicine because relief would promote dependency. And this is what he said. The judgment of God sat, sent this calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, and that that lesson should be born with patience. What that really translated as was that measures that could have been taken, like, for example, releasing Indian corn or maize that had been stockpiled in government depots to help feed the starving poor in Ireland was delayed because of this laissez faire economics. These Neoliberal ideas that intervening in the market would be less desirable than letting people die. Is that fair?
- [32:24]
B
Yeah, I think some of it is. All those missteps. So as the disease starts to really take hold, the British Prime Minister, Robert Peel, says that he finds the reports very alarming. But he says that there's always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news. So, you know, everything's going to be fine. By November 1845, there's a delegation that includes people like Daniel O', Connell, the Lord Mayor, who go to see the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who says, look, maybe this is a moment. We need to open ports to foreign corn or we need to stop distillation from grains, we need to save it for food or to ban the export of foodstuffs. And Hatesbury says, don't be alarmed, these are all premature. Scientists are all looking into it, but it's very, very quick that the problem starts to be very dramatic and people start to starve. We find in the course of the following months, deserted villages, people, all dead. We find the new Prime Minister who replaces Peel, John Russell, telling the House of Commons in January 1847 that the famine has not been known in modern times. Indeed, I should say it's like a famine of the 13th century, which he means the Black Death. Acting on the population of the 19th, it's reported that 50,000 Irish families have been turned out of their wretched dwellings by biggest having been able to pay their rents too. And the worst year of the famine in 1847 is known as the Black 47. So you mentioned Afwa of stockpiling food that's not then provided, but there's a whole sort of catalog of errors that are a disaster. So when some food relief does arrive, initial shipments of unground dried kernels, and not many Irish mills are able to mill maize. So the complicated process and the time that's required is also tricky. Cornmeal, if it's going to be consumed, has to be cooked again. If not, you get severe bowel complaints and it becomes known as Peel's brimstone. So the things that the steps that are taken are too little too late. And like you said, Sir Charles Trevelyan is the one who's blamed for delaying the release of Indian crops. And also he thinks that if he allows the market to take control, things will be fine. So that racialized context you mentioned, afwa, is really important and even the chance of the next chequer. Charles Wood shares these anti Irish moralistic views and Wood says that the famine will eliminate the present habits of dependence and will teach the Irish to work harder and work out how to solve their own poverty problems. So it's a terrible set of circumstances.
- [34:48]
D
And it's not just the failure to provide relief. But as you mentioned, Peter, Ireland is still exporting food to feed England. And I think that's the thing that's really hard to wrap your head around because you imagine a famine to be a situation in which there is no food. But this is still a fertile country that's producing other crops, it's producing meat, it's producing other agricultural goods. These are being exported to feed the English in their towns and cities and their industry. And so just the additional callousness of having people produce food and have to ship it out of the country while they starve to death really completes the picture. And I think this will be familiar to people who studied the Bengal famine or these other colonial atrocities where it's not a question of there not being enough food, it's a question of the colonial system of export. And combining that with an attitude that really is racialized. And, you know, for people listening who are a bit confused about the racial element, the Irish were not regarded as equal to the Anglo Saxon white race in this period. In fact, many scholars have described what happened to the Irish in the 20th century as a period of being assimilated into whiteness. Quite recently in history, and right up until the mid 20th century, there was this racial ideology in the way that the English described the Irish as a lesser race. It was combined with their Celtic history, with their Catholicism, these ideas that they kind of fell outside the purity of whiteness, which helped justify in the minds of these kind of colonial figures the idea that their lives were worth less and that therefore it was tolerable, maybe not ideal, but tolerable, that they should die in these vast numbers.
- [36:28]
B
And you've got, you know, like I mentioned Charles Wood, the chancellor, you know, he says that this is going to spark a social revolution. It's a want of food and employment. It's a calamity sent by Providence. It's going to have a wonderful impetus, he says, to change our society for the better. And, you know, you mentioned suffering in Bengal and Amartya Sen, the great Nobel Prize winning economist, you know how he's written about it? Exactly in the same processes, which is that food supply is always made worse by bad decisions and intentionally bad decisions. Amartya senses that no other famine in the world has the proportion of the number of people being killed as large as in the Irish famines. In the 1840s. And to put that into kind of context, the death toll in Ireland in the mid-1840s to early 1950s, the population falls by almost 40%. So a million dead, probably. In addition to all those who died, well over a million emigrates, most heading across the Atlantic to North America. And how this gets written about by Irish historians and nationalists like John Mitchell called the last conquest of Ireland in 1861. He said the British actions during the famine were a deliberate effort at genocide. And it contains a sentence that's then since become very famous. He said the Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine. So that that bleak apocalyptic process of not just too little being done too late, but the sort of willful standing by when interventions could have saved lives. It speaks, I think, to ideas about causeless colonialism, as you said, but also about inefficiencies of governments to cope with problems when they were staring them in the eyes.
- [38:03]
D
And, you know, not forgetting that this is an episode about the potato. The natural part of this disaster all stems from the way in which Ireland had become dependent on the potato. And it's such a huge part of the the potato's legacy, the way that it shaped Irish history, because as late as the 1960s, Ireland's population was still only half what it had been in 1840, which is an incredible statistic when you think about population growth basically everywhere. And today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only country in Europe, maybe the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries now than it did 150 years ago. So that kind of brain drain, that huge emigration, that catastrophic experience of death, has really left a profound legacy on Ireland. And I mentioned migration, because for many people in Ireland in that period, the conundrum was simple, migrate or die. And as one scholars put it, the next world or the new world. And this is where what happened in Ireland then happened to America, because the vast majority of the Irish who did decide to emigrate went to North America.
- [39:23]
B
PETER that's right. Just before we get to those consequences, which are really important, I think it's key to underline how even today, those legacies of the great Irish Famine have still been kept covered up. So Mary macaleese, the former president of Ireland, in the foreword to the atlas of the Great Irish Famine that came out about 15 years ago, said that for many years the event was cloaked in silence, its memory, for the most part, buried or neglected. But, you know, it's very hard to understate what those consequences are of the ways in which Irish people, and Catholics in particular, both during the Famine but also afterwards, came to define their relationship with United Kingdom. So in his sermons, the Irish Catholic priest who was alive during the Great Hunger, used to explain how the famine was also the fault of the British and how important it was that the Irish people stand up for themselves rather than be treated this way again, too. And that process of the land war of the late 1870s and 1880s, led by figures like Michael Davitt and Irish National Land League, they drew directly on famine memories, as so too did the rise of Irish nationalism and the campaigns for independence. The easter rising of 1816, the War of Independence, the formation of the Irish Free State. They were all fueled in part by the historical narrative in which not just hunger and suffering, but lack of self determination was absolutely key. So in 1995, for example, Mary Robinson, also president, described the famine as the great defining event in Irish history and how its memory had shaped the Irish Diaspora, too.
- [41:03]
D
I think there's a whole extra legacy to look at in the impact of Irish emigration to America, how that reshaped American society, American politics, American culture, as well as the lasting impact on Ireland. But I can't think of a better way to tell the story of how the potato has become an incredible source of food, culture, joy for some, not for me in many parts of the world, but also how it has been part of a colonial story in really complex ways, you know, both in this Colombian exchange, but also the way that the diseases that Europeans brought to the Americas, as we know, wiped out so much of the indigenous population there. There were also diseases like these crop diseases that came from the Americas to. To Europe and cause widespread famine exacerbated by more colonialism within Europe, as the Irish story shows us. So the potato sounds like such a harmless thing, but its history couldn't be richer.
- [42:04]
B
Well, it's been fantastic to have a chance to talk about the potatoes. I think that, you know, we've looked at average heights. We've looked at Irish nationalism and independence. We've looked at colonialism, we looked at the Andes, We've looked at disease coming from Peru through ports on the east coast of America. It's been fantastic. Af, as always, I hope I've convinced you next time you see a potato on a menu to give it a go and not think too badly of it. But I'm looking forward to seeing you all next time here on Legacy.
- [42:29]
D
Yeah. Thank you, Peter. See you next time on Legacy.
- [42:50]
F
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