150th Anniversary of genocide: How British free trade starved millions during Ireland's Potato Famine (1995)

by Paul Gallagher
Printed in the The American Almanac, May 29, 1995.

 

 The May 24-26, 1995 White House Conference on the economic development of Northern Ireland, continues an important policy initiative by which President Clinton has already helped bring a season of peace to Ulster after 25 years of civil war. Further success would come by starting to connect Ireland, by tunnel, to new transport grids all the way across Eurasia: the "Eurasian Land Bridges" first proposed six years ago by Lyndon LaRouche and now under planning by leading governments. This would lead to development of new rails, power, and roads in Ireland, the country (North and South) with the least transport infrastructure and the most underdeveloped economy in Europe. This transport integration of Ireland would pass through Ulster and also help the wrecked British economy, if there were a British government which wished to do so.

But the British Tory government of John Major, the moribund successor to Maggie Thatcher's 10-year rule of ruin, should not be allowed to contaminate President Clinton's Ireland development conference with the "free trade" ideology that has turned the British Isles into a post-industrial junk heap. A British "free trade" government can do nothing but more harm to its own economy and that of Ireland. The road to a stable peace in Ireland, as in other economically collapsed regions of the globe, will be built only on the foundation of government-directed infrastructure development.

Beginning 150 years ago this fall, British "free trade" policy--the same policy Thatcher and her imitators still fanatically insist upon--caused the genocide of 2 million out of 8 million Irish subjects in four years. In contrast to the Nazis, the British perpetrators of this 1845-1849 genocide were not punished for their policies, nor did they change them in any way afterwards. In their quoted statements on that episode of genocide, presented below, you will recognize precisely the dominant British "free trade" policies of today, parroted by such as Milton Friedman and the "neo-Conservative revolutionaries" in our Congress.

Ireland has never recovered from Britain's nineteenth century "free trade" rule. It has only 5 million citizens today, and its scant industrial and agricultural progress in the twentieth century is due entirely to the national institutions built by the Sinn Fein movement of 1902-1924, which explicitly opposed British free trade dogma.

Contrary to the demands of John Major's government--breathing scandals and corruption when it breathes at all--Sinn Fein should participate fully in the White House conference. Major's government, and any British "free trade" government, in fact, has a good deal to learn from them.

Not Potatoes, But Slavery

Any historian who has studied the subject further than former Vice-President Dan Quayle, knows that potatoes (or the lack thereof) did not cause the Irish famine and genocide 150 years ago. The potato blight which struck the harvest in autumn 1845, had begun in North Carolina, and spread to destroy potato crops throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years; it did not cause famine or mass death anywhere except in Ireland. Nor were potatoes the only major produce of Irish agriculture at the time; they were just the only produce which the Irish--75 percent of whom were feudal tenants of British landlords, fanatical preachers of ``free trade"--were allowed to eat or to feed to their livestock. The historian Arthur Young had written, like many others, that the Irish tenant farmers were slaves in effect:

"A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier [tenant farmer] dares to refuse .... He may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense."

Free trade exported or sold all the corn, wheat, barley, and oats Irish farmers grew, in order that they should pay their rents. All crops became cash crops--and there was nothing left for the farmer and his family to eat. British free trade tolerated no change in this situation while a million Irish starved to death, heavily deploying troops to protect the export ships. Free trade evicted instantly all farmers who stopped paying their rents, and the large landlords, led by British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, evicted their tenants more rapidly than before as they were starving in the 1840s, even evicting many who were still paying rent. Free trade decreed that no money would be spent on infrastructure projects such as drainage, harbors, fisheries, etc., though a committee of prominent Irish subjects led by Thomas Drummond had quickly surveyed what was most needed. Ireland at that time had 164 miles of railways; England had 6,621 miles.

Free trade decreed that no government surplus food--"no welfare"-- be given to the starving, in order to leave the market for food undisturbed. "We do not propose," Prime Minister Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, "to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain may be brought into Ireland." Free trade insisted that the destitute work on the Public Works or in the workhouses, and that these hundreds of thousands should receive wages below the miserable levels prevailing, in order not to distort the labor market. Thus laborers died in large numbers "on the works" and in the Poor Law houses. Free trade gave the Irish farm families three choices when the potato crops failed: starve on their farms, while selling their grain crops and paying their rent; report to the Public Works or the Poor Law workhouses to be worked/starved to death as the Nazis did to the inmates of Auschwitz; or emigrate and take a 50 percent chance of surviving the passage across the Atlantic.

The Irish population was officially 8.1 million in 1845. Some 1.5 million human beings died of starvation and disease in Ireland in four years, while more than one million attempted to emigrate; of these, about 500,000 died--usually of typhus--in passage or in quarantine camps in Canada and New England. The Montreal Board of Health stated of those in the camps in 1847, ``It may well be supposed that few of the survivors could reach any other than an early grave." In that period, among the Irish emigrant population of Massachusetts, average life expectancy was estimated by Lemuel Shattuck at 13.4 years, with 60 percent dying by the age of 5: a level characteristic of Stone Age human societies.

When it was "over," the British officials directly in charge of "Irish famine relief," particularly acting Treasury Minister Sir Charles Trevelyan, congratulated themselves and were decorated as Queen Victoria made her gala 1848 visit to Ireland. As 1847 ended, Trevelyan wrote: ``It is my opinion that too much has been done for the people. Under such treatment the people have grown worse instead of better, and we must now try what independent exertion, and the operation of natural causes, can do.... I shall rest after two years of such continuous hard work in public service, as I have never had in my life."

Then, having vacationed in France, he added: "[The] problem of Irish overpopulation being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been supplied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence."

The British historian Charles Kingsley, who accompanied the Queen on her gracious and glorious visit, wrote:

"I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that 100 miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much."

However, Lord Clarendon, the British viceroy in Ireland during the famine, saw the situation more clearly. He wrote to Prime Minister Lord John Russell: "I don't think there is another legislature in Europe [other than the British] that would coldly persist in this policy of extermination."

How It Was Done

British free trade had been working to create this disaster for a long time previously. The crucial period was the 1785-1845 policies of William Petty, the second Lord Shelburne, and Prime Minister William Pitt, who took over the British governments after the American Revolution, and for whom Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations and other "free trade" tracts.

The great Irish writer and leader Jonathan Swift had written already in 1730: ``One-half of all Irish rents is spent in England ... with other incidents, (it) will amount to full half of the income of the whole kingdom, all clear profit to England.... The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars."

During the same period, a Lord Chancellor Bowes in Dublin made a published ruling that ``the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic."

However, in the eighteenth century, the condition of the Irish had improved for the first time since the Elizabethan and Cromwellian invasions (which explicitly intended genocide, but with less effective means than ``free trade" proved to be). This improvement was due in large part to the organizing efforts of Swift and his Leibnizian networks. In particular, the Irish merchant marine had been revived, her ports improved, effective taxes lowered, and the clothing, linen, and glass industries developed, and agriculture had been improved. The Penal Laws of the 1690s had been intended to insure that Irish Catholics would be reduced to potato culture on rented land. [fn1] But effective organizing of the large number of Scottish Protestant immigrant landlords, had allowed some development and led to a united Catholic-Protestant movement which gained the Constitution of 1782, during the American War of Independence. The Irish population had begun to grow rapidly.

Prime Minister William Pitt's policy was described by Sinn Fein's founder and Ireland's first President, Arthur Griffith.

"On the 12th of May, 1785, Pitt's new proposals were introduced in the English Parliament. They provided, among other things, that Ireland should not trade with any country where its trading might clash with the interests of England's mightiest corporation--the East India Company ... and that the navigation laws which the British Parliament adopted should be accepted by Ireland."

To impose this "free trade" policy, Pitt eventually sponsored and repressed the Irish Uprising of 1798, to disarm the Irish Volunteers and introduce large numbers of British troops, and to force the 1801 Act of Union which annulled the Irish Constitution. (During the same period, the same policy of the same Pitt and Shelburne also reduced and impoverished Scotland, which had begun to industrialize at the time of the American Revolution.) In his political pamphlets, Arthur Griffith described in detail how Pitt after 1801 destroyed Ireland's new manufactures, particularly linens, by dumping British goods there, and rapidly eliminated independent Irish shipping. Even worse, was the collapse in land use under Pitt and Shelburne's "free trade" policy. By the 1820s, 80 percent of all Ireland's land was owned by British and Scottish landlords, and 25 percent of all land was completely unused for any purpose except real estate speculation. Some 75 percent of what was used, was in grain or horse/cattle pasture, most of this for export by merchants under London's domination. On the remainder, the Irish grew their potatoes; on perhaps two acres of rented land for each large family.

All nineteenth-century accounts of those who saw both the Irish tenant farmers and African slaves in America and the Caribbean, agree that the Irish were far worse off. In 1845, a British government commission headed by the economist Nassau Senior counted up what free trade had done: Except during the brief potato harvest, there was no work at all for 2.4 million Irish adults; by today's calculations, 60 percent unemployment. Woolen, linen, poplin, furniture and glass manufacture had disappeared; fishing had nearly disappeared for lack of capital for boats, storage, etc. Even water-powered grain mills had disappeared, in the country which had introduced them to Europe 1300 years earlier. There were only 39 hospitals serving 8 million people. The famous Duke of Wellington wrote in 1829 that "there never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland."

Senior's was not the first such commission, so the British government knew exactly what its "free trade" policies were creating in Ireland. In 1824, a previous commissioner was asked in Parliament: "Looking ahead to 15 years or more, what must this increase in population in Ireland, without any employment, end in?" He answered, "I don't know. I think it is terrible to reflect upon."

Once the famine was underway, the same Nassau Senior wrote that he feared it would not kill more than a million people, which would scarcely be enough to eliminate the unemployment.

But in 1842, 6 million pounds Sterling in rents were remitted out of Ireland to England, and a very large amount of real estate lending speculation in the City of London was based upon those rents. Much later, in 1898, an Irish commission calculated that, during the entire century of ``free trade" since Pitt's Act of Union of 1801, the net flow of wealth from Ireland to England had totalled 250 million pounds Sterling.

Free Trade Without Money

Thus, when blight destroyed three-quarters of the potato crop of 1845, a sizeable majority of the Irish population owned no land, earned no wages, and paid as rent most or all of the proceeds of the sale of their grain crops. They had little or no money or means of raising it; nearly 2 million did not even sell their own produce, but turned it all over as rent in exchange for being allowed to grow potatoes on small strips of land.

Sir Robert Peel was British Prime Minister for the first half of 1846 after the destruction of the first potato crop. Immediately, a committee of Irish citizens (rather, subjects) headed by Henry Drummond made urgent proposals:

1) stop the export of corn and the distilling of grain into spirits;

2) remove duties on food imports;

3) public works concentrating on rail and harbor (fishing) infrastructure and drainage projects;

4) relief committees funded in part by a 10 percent tax on landlords (20-50 percent on absentees); and

5) in part by a £1.5 million 10-year British loan on the security of Irish hardwood forests.

Prime Minister Peel ignored all but 2), which he used as a pretext to push for repeal of the British Corn Laws making import of Irish corn into Britain much easier. Otherwise Peel's government bought, against a 3.5 million pound crop loss, a total of £100,000 worth of American Indian corn, purchased through Baring Brothers' Bank. The reason for the tiny amount, was that it was to be locked up in military storehouses in Ireland, under control of Relief Commissioner Col. Henry Routh, and used "only as a leverage stock for purposes of preventing, through occasional sales from these stocks, an overfast rise in the market of foodstuffs." Thirdly, Peel allowed formation of relief committees which could propose public works, but with no British government funds and solely voluntary (charitable) contributions from landlords in Ireland.

Treasury Head Sir Charles Trevelyan became effective dictator of the "relief" of Ireland, and already in June 1846 he was writing to Colonel Routh:

"The only way to prevent people from becoming habitually dependent on government, is to bring [relief] operations to a close. The uncertainty about the new crop [there were already signs of a second year of potato blight] only makes it more necessary.... These things should be stopped now, or you run the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise and having this country on you for an indefinite number of years."

Almost nothing of the tiny government "reserve stock" remained by then anyway. Baring's had one more ship on the way, but Trevelyan ordered that "the cargo of the Sorciere is not wanted; her owners must dispose of it as they think proper."

In September, when the Irish had begun to die of starvation and there was plenty of evidence of the 100 percent failure of the second, 1846 potato crop, the Times of London added:

"Such are the thanks that a government gets for attempting to palliate great afflictions and satisfy corresponding demands by an inevitable but ruinous beneficence.... It is the old thing, the old malady, the national character, the national thoughtlessness, the national indolence."

Meanwhile, Peel's Tory government had been voted out for trying to repeal the Corn Laws--Great Britain's high tariffs on imported grain. Lord John Russell's Whig government replaced it and did get them repealed. During 1846, Ireland exported enough wheat, barley, oats, oatmeal, pigs, eggs, and butter to feed its entire population. Many modern historians have noted outrage at this export, which was heavily guarded by British troops against starving crowds. But few note that under British free trade policies, even more wheat was imported into Ireland that year than exported; however, at least half the entire Irish population was without any means to buy food; "free trade" dictated that none be given--"no welfare"--and the rate of evictions was growing with their destitution.

Irish members of the British Parliament in London proposed the government buy stocks of grain otherwise to be exported, and sell it in the worst famine areas, especially in Connaught where starvation deaths were growing. The answer from Lord Russell directly was no: ``Purchase by government of any food in ordinary use is forbidden in order to avoid competition with private traders." Trevelyan and Colonel Routh agreed that "there must be a distinction clearly kept between the ordinary distress of the people, and that resulting from the losses of the potato crop, which alone it may be our object to relieve."

Lord Russell's government added a Public Works program which was widespread but unfunded; local committees had to propose the works and sign a contract holding their members personally responsible to repay the British government 100 percent of the cost within two years, plus interest of 3 percent per annum! At first the government sometimes added partial matching grants for local money raised, but these were very difficult to qualify for, and were completely discontinued in 1847. During all of 1846, with 3 million Irish unemployed and selling everything down to their family beds for food, a total of 5,000 pounds-Sterling was expended for piers, harbors, drainage, navigation and water power projects combined: In other words, none were carried out.

Russell and Trevelyan made a Public Works rule, which was later found as well in the Constitution of Jefferson Davis's Confederacy:

"Any public works done shall not be of a nature to benefit any individuals in any greater degree than all of the rest of the community."

To the despair of the better-off Irish farmers who were trying to save their countrymen, this rule eliminated all projects for drainage of bogs--the only way to rapidly increase food production--on the grounds that this would preferentially benefit those living nearest the bog being drained.

This was the common "free trade" argument against government infrastructure-building which was used against Abraham Lincoln's Illinois networks at the same time. As a result of this "rule," the Public Works during the Irish famine built only roads, which was the one kind of infrastructure which the country already had plenty of. The wages were supposedly set at subsistence levels, but as desperate people deluged the "Works," the wages were often paid weeks late, and many thousands starved to death "on the Works." Meanwhile, in the Workhouses (called Poor Houses the next year after passage of the Irish Poor Law), several hundred thousand elderly, infirm, and young children crowded, dying more slowly of malnutrition and disease.

The Tavistock Grin

Lord John Russell evaluated the reports of the second consecutive complete failure of the potato crop as no reason to change policy. Lord Russell, the 6th Duke of Bedford, was known for his small stature and icy smile; he was so cold and arrogant that even his brother, the Marquess of Tavistock, told him he was offensive to his own Whig followers. By the winter of 1846-47, the Irish people had begun to die of starvation in large numbers.

Lord Russell's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, announced that there would be no more government importation of Indian corn or any other food--private enterprise would provide it. He announced, that the problem in 1845-6 had been that "private trade had been paralyzed by government purchases," and that "merchants had declared they would not import food at all if the government were to do so." Public Works were to be limited to one year, and ended by Aug. 15, 1847, and their expense was "to fall entirely on persons possessed of property in the distressed district."

Thus, Sir Charles Wood. In autumn 1846 crops failed in many European countries. French and German governments and bidders bought large amounts of grain from America and elsewhere, while the British government "sat it out." Food dealers in Ireland were now charging enormous prices, which Trevelyan welcomed in a letter to Colonel Routh:

"The high prices will have a regulating influence, as nothing is more calculated to attract supplies, and especially from America.... Do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports (from Ireland): perfect Free Trade is the right course. Nothing ought to be done for the West of Ireland which might send prices, already high, still higher for people who, unlike the inhabitants of the West Coast of Ireland, have to depend on their own exertions."

Evictions were now going on massively and it was clear that wholesale starvation would take place in 1847. Colonel Routh sent out a memo to his relief officers:

"represent to applicants for government supplies of food, the necessity for private enterprise and importations."

In December 1846 Whitehall ordered all Commissariat officers in Ireland to cease all food sales. Colonel Routh added in a memo:

"Even if it were practicable at the moment to open our depots [he knew they were actually empty] it would be prejudicial to owners of grain, inasmuch as at present extraordinary prices can be realized."

If this seems an egregious government endorsement of price gouging, Trevelyan repeated it himself: "If dealers were to confine themselves to what in ordinary circumstances might be considered fair profits, the scarcity would be aggravated fearfully...."

Trevelyan added that the government would also do nothing about the new problem--the disastrous fact that all seed potatoes had been eaten and there was nothing to plant in 1847: ``The moment it came to be understood that the government would supply seed, the painful exertions of private initiative to preserve a stock of seed would be relaxed."

No seed would be provided, and, as it turned out, the 1847 potato harvest was to be blight-free, but only 20 percent of normal anyway for lack of seed and the death, exhaustion, or illness of farm families. The chance was not to be repeated: The 1848 crop again was destroyed by blight.

In January 1847, the British government smashed Circular #38, which the Irish Board of Public Works had issued, allowing "family task work" under a sensible emergency proposal of some large farmers. It would have paid farm families wages to work their own land, and more wages for also working on drainage projects. ``It is quite impossible," wrote Trevelyan, ``for my lords to give their sanction to parties being paid by public funds for the cultivation of their own land." That same month, Colonel Routh reported on Ireland's poorest county, Skibereen, that 50,000 pounds rent had been paid in 1846; there were only 12 landowners, all British lords and knights. The government also defeated a proposal of Lord George Bentinck in Parliament, for a railroad building act in Ireland funded by the British Treasury.

Lord Russell's government did, however, make one refinement in their "free trade" policy toward the genocide now actually gathering speed in Ireland. They passed the Irish Poor Law to end all British Public Works in Ireland by August of 1847, and to establish instead soup kitchens at the existing Workhouses, and new Workhouses "to be built." What they intended was ``deregulation" of public works, leaving them entirely up to the initiative (and the financing) of the local ``Poor Law Unions" in Ireland, which were funded by local "rates" (taxes). What they produced, perhaps intentionally, was total chaos and despair, as Colonel Routh ordered the Poor Law Unions (which were all completely bankrupt) to replace (i.e., evict) the elderly and infirm from the Workhouses to make way for "able-bodied" skeletons who would report to work there in exchange for soup for their families. But since the British government was still expending a bit of public money in Ireland, Sir Charles Trevelyan wanted that wrapped up quickly: "the government would now be relieved," he announced, "from feeding the people through its officers." In a private letter of that month, February 1847, he added, "It is hard upon the poor people to be deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God's Providence." And Trevelyan added threatening letters to Public Works head Colonel Jones and new Relief Commission head Sir John Burgoyne, telling them they were spending far too much money.

Breakdown

In February-March 1847 came the final implosion and breakdown of "free trade": private food imports from America arrived in the amount of 100,000 tons; some never made it to markets for lack of infrastructure (carters had lost their workers and sold their equipment), and the rest couldn't be sold for lack of buyers with any money. The prices of grains now collapsed. Typhus began to spread in March, so that from that point onward, the better-off classes in Ireland also died in large numbers.

As a kind of final "free trade" commentary, Trevelyan had his secretary send this statement to all Poor Law Unions in July, 1847:"There is much reason to believe that the object of the Relief Act is greatly perverted and that it is frequently applied solely as a means of adding to the comforts of the lower classes ... instead of being, as intended, a provision for the utterly destitute, and for the purpose of warding off absolute starvation.... The Commissioners cannot but complain of finding the demands for rations from many districts continuously increasing, and sometimes largely, without even a word of explanation to account for it."

Since now the entire cost of relief of the destitute and starving lay on the local "rates" paid by landlords, another side of the "rent bubble" of British "free trade" in Ireland now became exposed. Lord Mountcashel presented the following figures to the House of Lords: of the annual rent collection in Ireland of £13 million (a huge amount), the landlord class paid annually 10.5 million pounds-Sterling on "mortages and borrowed money" to the City of London bankers and speculators in real estate. Montcashel was making clear that an increase in rates, now planned by the British government, would siphon money off from mortgage payments, And, sure enough, in late summer 1847, the financial markets of London crashed, as the previous two years' speculation in rents, wheat, corn, and foreign railway shares collapsed.

With that collapse, the British government "wound up" its public works loans and tiny relief expenditures in Ireland in August 1847. Only Lord Clarendon, the Viceroy for Ireland, remained the protesting voice:

"What is to be done with these hordes? Improve them off the face of the earth, you will say, let them die. But there is a certain responsibility attaching to it."

Lord Palmerston's Tenants

Landlords in Ireland now tried to evict all the tenants they could in order to reduce the number of local destitute, and therefore their rates (poor relief taxes). They began to get, not just evictions, but criminal judgments for non-payment of rent, throwing the fathers of families into jail. This--as the landlords intended--finally set off the migration across the Atlantic which became a flood of starving, dying typhus-carriers into Canada and then New England in 1848-9.

Incredibly, large exports of foodstuffs from Ireland continued right through 1848 and 1849, which were the years in which the Irish population fell rapidly from 8 million to 6 million through death and emigration (and 40 percent of the emigrants died in crossing the Atlantic alone). In November 1848, exports of food from Cork in a single day, were 147 bales of bacon, 255 barrels of pork, 5 casks of hams, 3,000 sacks and barrels of oats, 300 bags of flour, 300 head of cattle, 239 sheep, 542 boxes of eggs, 9,300 firkins [about one-fourth of a barrel] of butter, and 150 casks of miscellaneous foodstuffs. But an inspector of the Public Works in Cork in the same month wrote about the public "workfare" rolls: "The lists are useless. No one answers their name. They have gone, or are dead."

1848 was the year in which "revolutions" and insurrections took place against those European governments targetted by the British, particularly France. Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston personally manipulated and directed the `"Young Europe" agents who fomented these insurrections. A very small and pathetic such "uprising" was apparently attempted that year by the "Young Ireland" movement; but in fact, Lord Russell had written to Palmerston three months earlier, acknowledging that this "Young Ireland" was controlled by Palmerston. "I am not yet ready to adopt, like Mr. Pitt, `ripening measures' to force on a rebellion," wrote Russell in December, 1847. Thus he was admitting, at the same time, that the Irish Uprising of 1798 had been sponsored and controlled by then-Prime Minister William Pitt, in order to force upon Ireland the ruinous rule of "Free Trade" in place of the Irish Constitution of 1782.

Palmerston's main operation that year was the "1848 Revolution" in France, which overthrew Louis Napoleon because the French had been refusing to open their ports to British Free Trade.

But he found time to evict nine shiploads full of his Irish tenants to Canada, 2,000 persons in all. As the ships arrived in New Brunswick, they raised storms of protest--on board children, elderly, and destitute were starving, many of they completely naked: "they had to be clothed by charity before they could, with decency, leave the ship." The

"Common Council of the City of St. John deeply regret that one of Her Majesty's ministers, the Rt. Hon. Lord Palmerston ... should have exposed such a numerous and distressed portion of his tenantry to the severity and privations of a New Brunswick winter ... unprovided with the common means of support, with broken-down constitutions and almost in a state of nudity."

The U.S. Congress at first passed emergency legislation to block the "typhus ships" of Irish immigrants from landing. Palmerston as foreign minister placed great pressure on the American government to open some of their ports to this particular human export of British Free Trade. Most Irish landed in Canada, but if they lived, they would not stay there. As Canada's Gov.-General Lord Dunham then admitted:

"On the American side all is bustle and activity. On the British side of the line, with the exception of a few favored spots, all seems waste and desolation."

So the Irish immigrants walked across the border to New England, where they continued to land, and to live in slums with Stone Age life expectancies for 20 years more.

Between 1902 and 1921, Irish national independence from Britain was finally won by the Sinn Fein movement, which was built on the rejection of British Free Trade, and the embrace of the ideas of the "American System" economists Friedrich List, Matthew Carey and Henry Carey.

The policies of William Pitt, Palmerston, Lord Russell and his heirs, including Lord Bertrand Russell, Charles Trevelyan et al. are precisely the policies of Margaret Thatcher and her Bush-league "neo-Conservative" free-trade followers today. British "Free Trade" dogma has no place at a White House conference on economic development.

Note

• 1. See Radcliff Salaman, below.

 

For Further Reading

1. Colum, Padraic, We Ourselves. New York and Dublin: Publisher, 1946.

2. Costigan, Giovanni, History of Modern Ireland. Cleveland, Oh: Western Publishers, 1959.

3. Curry, Eugene O., (ed.) Irish Historical Documents. Dublin: 1868.

4. McFee, Robert, Ireland. New York: Allen and Unwin, 1962.

5. Griffith, Arthur, The Resurrection of Hungary: An Example for Ireland. Dublin: Sinn Fein movement, 1905 and 1914.

6. Salaman, Radcliffe, The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

7. This volume supplies a year-by-year account of the potato famine in Ireland.

8. Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-49. London: 1962.

The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac.April 5, 1998

 

~ Source: American Almanac ~

 

Bengal's man-made famine and India's Nero

From: Ockham's Razor

 

Summary:

The famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-44 ultimately took the lives of about 4 million people. The speaker talks of how this man-made famine is absent from the history books and virtually unknown to most people.

Transcript:

Robyn Williams: Can you turn science to history? To test it, I mean? You can't really do experiments on the past, so how could it be applied? Dr Gideon Polya insists that science does have a role in this regard, and he'll explain in a minute. But the point of such an exercise is important here, because the reason for Dr Polya's concern (and he's written a book about it) is one of the worst genocides on record, or not on record, unless you search long and hard.

Gideon Polya is reader in biochemistry at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Gideon Polya: Humanity has made immense technological and scientific advances in the last few millennia through application of a scientific method involving the gathering of data, the generation of testable hypotheses, and experimentation to test the validity of such hypotheses. Reiteration of this process yields models that are progressively better approximations to reality.

Of course historically, this process has been impaired through authoritarian religious or political intervention. Such societal constraints aside, application of the scientific method can also encounter difficulties when past processes of the physical or biological world are considered. However, while we cannot recreate the explosion of a star, we can construct models that are consistent with the residual physical consequences of such events and with our current understanding of physical reality. Similarly, while we cannot recreate life currently, to biological scientists the Darwinian Theory of Evolution remains a powerful model explaining and systematising a huge body of information about past and present biological complexity.

Scientific approaches to human history are similarly constrained by the reality that it is generally not possible to do physical experiments to test historical models (although one can envisage, for example, computer simulations of past battles). In general the history is confined to relating model predictions back to pre-existing data, the physical consequences of events and human oral and written records of events. Of course value judgements, or culturally and philosophically biased 'weightings' will inevitably be applied to the relative importance of historical data. However some events involving massive loss of human life, such as the Jewish Holocaust, are so immense that they cannot be ignored, if at least for scientific predictive utility. Thus the Jewish Holocaust warns us of future dangers due to racism, moral unresponsiveness and the technological capacity for mass destruction.

The bottom line is that historians, like scientists, must respect the basic data. Selectively ignoring the data thwarts the quest for better approximations to the truth, and jeopardises informed prediction. While we all cynically accept the truism that 'history is written by the victors', the history of genocide in the 20th century, from South West Africa and Anatolia, to East Timor and Rwanda, reinforces the message that 'history ignored yields history repeated'. Deletion of massive man-made human catastrophes from history and from general perception is not simply scientifically flawed and unethical, it also increases the probability that the same unaddressed, contributing social pathologies will yield the same carnage in the future.

One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.

To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.

In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army.

The causes of the famine are complex, but ultimately when the price of rice rose above the ability of landless rural poor to pay and in the absence of humane, concerned government, millions simply starved to death or otherwise died of starvation-related causes. Although there was plenty of food potentially available, the price of rice rose through 'market forces', driven by a number of factors including: the cessation of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, a dramatic wartime decline in other requisite grain imports into India, compounded by the deliberate strategic slashing of Allied Indian Ocean shipping; heavy-handed government action in seizing Bengali rice stocks in sensitive areas; the seizure of boats critically required for food acquisition and rice distribution; and finally the 'divide and rule' policy of giving the various Indian provinces control over their own food stocks. Critically, cashed-up, wartime, industrial, Calcutta could pay for rice and sucked food out of a starving, food-producing countryside.

Ultimately, millions of Bengalis died because their British rulers didn't give a damn and had other strategic imperatives. The Bengal Famine and its aftermath for the debilitated Bengal population consumed its victims over several years in the case of complete British inaction through most of 1943 or insufficient subsequent action. Churchill had a confessed hatred for Indians and during the famine he opposed the humanitarian attempts of people such as the Prime Minister of Canada, Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy General Wavell, and even of Japanese collaborationist leader Subhash Chandra Bose. The hypothesis can be legitimately advanced that the extent of the Bengal Famine derived in part from sustained, deliberate policy.

The wartime Bengal Famine has become a 'forgotten holocaust' and has been effectively deleted from our history books, from school and university curricula and from general public perception. To the best of my knowledge, Churchill only wrote of it once, in a secret letter to Roosevelt dated April 29th 1944 in which he made the following remarkable plea for help in shipping Australian grain to India: 'I am no longer justified in not asking for your help.' Churchill's six-volume 'History of the Second World War' fails to mention the cataclysm that was responsible for about 90% of total British Empire casualties in that conflict but makes the extraordinary obverse claim: 'No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.'

This whitewashing of Indian famine extends to two centuries of famine in British India. I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made. While Tony Blair has apologised for the mid-19th century Irish Famine that took over a million lives, there has been no apology for the World War 2 Bengal Famine.

My book is entitled, 'Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History' and sub-titled, 'Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability'. I describe this whitewashing of history as 'Austenising' after Jane Austen, whose exquisite novels were utterly free of the ugly social realities of her time. Some of Jane Austen's siblings and other connections, were involved in the rape of India. Of major note was Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, who ferociously taxed famine-devastated Bengal and was eventually impeached and tried but ultimately acquitted for his manifold abuses in India. Warren Hastings almost certainly seduced Jane Austen's aunt, Philadelphia Hancock. This adultery gave rise to Jane Austen's lively cousin Eliza who is an evident model for the more advanced women of Jane Austen's novels. While much of the huge academic Jane Austen industry has ignored (or 'Austenised') such interesting aspects of the lives of Jane Austen's relatives, Jane Austen herself was much more forthcoming; thus to the initiated, 'Sense and Sensibility', the most Indian of her novels, includes a very detailed and barely disguised account of the Warren Hastings Scandal.

While it was legitimate for Jane Austen, the artist, to render her exquisite novels free of the contemporary awfulness in which her connections participated, the continuing 'Austenising' of British history is a holocaust-denying outrage that threatens humanity. Currently, 20-million people die each year of starvation-related causes and conservative, status quo productivity estimates would predict 30-million such deaths per year in the year 2050. A more realistic but still non-Malthusian view can be taken based on declining per capita agricultural production due to land degradation, decreased water availability, global warming effects on tropical cereal yields and increased population. A return from the current annual mortalities of about 10 per 1000 to the 35 per 1000 per year that obtained in British India in 1947 would yield a Third World excess mortality in 2050 of a staggering 200-million persons per year. Nevertheless this is avoidable, thus peri-conception, male sex selection provides just one simple example of a cheap, non-intrusive, pro-choice and technologically and socially feasible approach to slowing and indeed reversing population growth. That such an apparently radical suggestion is socially feasible is evidenced by the extraordinarily peaceful and tolerant multiracial society of Fiji, yet the initial male to female ratio among the indentured Indian five-year slaves was about 3 to 1.

The remorselessly continuing human catastrophe of mass starvation is avoidable provided that there is determined global responsiveness of a kind that was absent for both the Jewish Holocaust and the Bengal Famine of half a century ago. One hopes that the recent award of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and expert analyst of the Bengal Famine, will increase global responsiveness to this continuing humanitarian disaster. We must resurrect the horrors hidden by two centuries of holocaust-ignoring historians, resolutely face the current environmental and humanitarian cris and apply the post-Holocaust injunction of 'Never again'.

Robyn Williams: 'Never again', says Dr Gideon Polya, Reader in biochemistry at La Trobe University in Melbourne. And his interest in the subject of India (yes, I did ask) stems in part from having a Bengali wife. His book, by the way, can be ordered by writing to Dr Polya at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

 

 

From: Late Victorian Holocausts - El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World By MIKE DAVIS

 

The central government under the leadership of Queen Victoria's favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). As The Times's special correspondent described it, "The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction true ... nothing was too rich, nothing too costly." "Lytton put on a spectacle," adds a biographer of Lord Salisbury (the secretary of state for India), "which achieved the two criteria Salisbury had set him six months earlier, of being `gaudy enough to impress the orientals' ... and furthermore a pageant which hid `the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.'" Its "climacteric ceremonial" included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress's subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular durbar. Indians in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero.

    Following this triumph, the viceroy seemed to regard the growing famine as a tiresome distraction from the Great Game of preempting Russia in Central Asia by fomenting war with the blameless Sher Ali, the Emir of Afghanistan. Lytton, according to Salisbury, was "burning with anxiety to distinguish himself in a great war." Serendipitously for him, the Czar was on a collision course with Turkey in the Balkans, and Disraeli and Salisbury were eager to show the Union Jack on the Khyber Pass. Lytton's warrant, as he was constantly reminded by his chief budgetary adviser, Sir John Strachey, was to ensure that Indian, not English, taxpayers paid the costs of what Radical critics later denounced as "a war of deliberately planned aggression." The depreciation of the rupee made strict parsimony in the non-military budget even more urgent.

    The 44-year-old Lytton, the former minister to Lisbon, had replaced the Earl of Northbrook after the latter had honorably refused to acquiesce in Disraeli's machiavellian "forward" policy on the northwest frontier. He was a strange and troubling choice (actually, only fourth on Salisbury's short list) to exercise paramount authority over a starving subcontinent of 250 million people. A writer, seemingly admired only by Victoria, who wrote "vast, stale poems" and ponderous novels under the nom de plume of Owen Meredith, he had been accused of plagiarism by both Swinburne and his own father, Bulwer-Lytton (author of The Last Days of Pompeii). Moreover, it was widely suspected that the new viceroy's judgement was addled by opium and incipient insanity. Since a nervous breakdown in 1868, Lytton had repeatedly exhibited wild swings between megalomania and self-lacerating despair.

    Although his possible psychosis ("Lytton's mind tends violently to exaggeration" complained Salisbury to Disraeli) was allowed free rein over famine policy, it became a cabinet scandal after he denounced his own government in October 1877 for "allegedly attempting to create an Anglo-Franco-Russian coalition against Germany." As one of Salisbury's biographers has emphasized, this was "about as absurd a contention as it was possible to make at the time, even from the distance of Simla," and it produced an explosion inside Whitehall. "Salisbury explained the Viceroy's ravings by admitting that he was `a little mad'. It was known that both Lytton and his father had used opium, and when Derby read the `inconceivable' memorandum, he concluded that Lytton was dangerous and should resign: `When a man inherits insanity from one parent, and limitless conceit from the other, he has a ready-made excuse for almost any extravagance which he may commit.'"

    But in adopting a strict laissez-faire approach to famine, Lytton, demented or not, could claim to be extravagance's greatest enemy. He clearly conceived himself to be standing on the shoulders of giants, or, at least, the sacerdotal authority of Adam Smith, who a century earlier in The Wealth of Nations had asserted (vis-à-vis the terrible Bengal drought-famine of 1770) that "famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth." Smith's injunction against state attempts to regulate the price of grain during famine had been taught for years in the East India Company's famous college at Haileybury. Thus the viceroy was only repeating orthodox curriculum when he lectured Buckingham that high prices, by stimulating imports and limiting consumption, were the "natural saviours of the situation." He issued strict, "semi-theological" orders that "there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food," and "in his letters home to the India Office and to politicians of both parties, he denounced `humanitarian hysterics'." "Let the British public foot the bill for its `cheap sentiment,' if it wished to save life at a cost that would bankrupt India." By official dictate, India like Ireland before it had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered against dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the "inconvenience of dearth." Grain merchants, in fact, preferred to export a record 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Europe in 1877-78 rather than relieve starvation in India.

    Lytton, to be fair, probably believed that he was in any case balancing budgets against lives that were already doomed or devalued of any civilized human quality. The grim doctrines of Thomas Malthus, former Chair of Political Economy at Haileybury, still held great sway over the white rajas. Although it was bad manners to openly air such opinions in front of the natives in Calcutta, Malthusian principles, updated by Social Darwinism, were regularly invoked to legitimize Indian famine policy at home in England. Lytton, who justified his stringencies to the Legislative Council in 1877 by arguing that the Indian population "has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil," most likely subscribed to the melancholy viewpoint expressed by Sir Evelyn Baring (afterwards Lord Cromer), the finance minister, in a later debate on the government's conduct during the 1876-79 catastrophe. "[E]very benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation." In the same vein, an 1881 report "concluded that 80% of the famine mortality were drawn from the poorest 20% of the population, and if such deaths were prevented this stratum of the population would still be unable to adopt prudential restraint. Thus, if the government spent more of its revenue on famine relief, an even larger proportion of the population would become penurious." As in Ireland thirty years before, those with the power to relieve famine convinced themselves that overly heroic exertions against implacable natural laws, whether of market prices or population growth, were worse than no effort at all.

    His recent biographers claim that Salisbury, the gray eminence of Indian policy, was privately tormented by these Malthusian calculations. A decade earlier, during his first stint as secretary of state for India, he had followed the advice of the Council in Calcutta and refused to intervene in the early stages of a deadly famine in Orissa. "I did nothing for two months," he later confessed. "Before that time the monsoon had closed the ports of Orissa — help was impossible — and — it is said — a million people died. The Governments of India and Bengal had taken in effect no precautions whatever.... I never could feel that I was free from all blame for the result." Accordingly, he harbored a lifelong distrust of officials who "worshipped political economy as a sort of `fetish'" as well as Englishmen in India who accepted "famine as a salutary cure for over-population." Yet, whatever his private misgivings, Salisbury had urged appointment of the laissez-faire fanatic Lytton and publicly congratulated Disraeli for repudiating "the growing idea that England ought to pay tribute to India for having conquered her." Indeed, when his own advisers later protested the repeal of cotton duties in the face of the fiscal emergency of the famine, Salisbury denounced as a "species of International Communism" the idea "that a rich Britain should consent to penalize her trade for the sake of a poor India."

    Like other architects of the Victorian Raj, Salisbury was terrified of setting any precedent for the permanent maintenance of the Indian poor. As the Calcutta Review pointed out in 1877, "In India there is no legal provision made for the poor, either in British territory, or in the native states; [although] the need for it is said by medical men and others, to be exceedingly great." Both Calcutta and London feared that "enthusiastic prodigality" like Buckingham's would become a trojan horse for an Indian Poor Law. In its final report, the Famine Commission of 1878-80 approvingly underscored Lord Lytton's skinflint reasoning: "The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief ... would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension...." None of the principal players on either side of the House of Commons disagreed with the supreme principle that India was to be governed as a revenue plantation, not an almshouse.

The `Temple Wage'

Over the next year, the gathering horror of the drought-famine spread from the Madras Presidency through Mysore, the Bombay Deccan and eventually into the North Western Provinces. The crop losses in many districts of the Deccan plateau and Tamilnad plains (see Table 1.2) were nothing short of catastrophic. Ryots in district after district sold their "bullocks, field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows" to survive the terrible first year of the drought. Without essential means of production, however, they were unable to take advantage of the little rain that fell in April-May 1877 to sow emergency crops of rape and cumboo. As a result they died in their myriads in August and September.

    Millions more had reached the stage of acute malnutrition, characterized by hunger edema and anemia, that modern health workers call skeletonization. Village officers wrote to their superiors from Nellore and other ravaged districts of the Madras Deccan that the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, "fat as sheep," that feasted on the bodies of dead children:

[A]fter a couple of minutes' search, I came upon two dogs worrying over the body of a girl about eight years old. They had newly attacked it, and had only torn one of the legs a little, but the corpse was so enormously bloated that it was only from the total length of the figure one could tell it was a child's. The sight and smell of the locality were so revolting, and the dogs so dangerous, that I did not stay to look for a second body; but I saw two skulls and a backbone which had been freshly picked.

Officials, however, were not eager to share such horrors with the English or educated Indian publics, and the vernacular press charged that starvation deaths were being deliberately misreported as cholera or dysentery mortality in order to disguise the true magnitude of the famine.

    Conditions were equally desperate across the linguistic and administrative boundary in the Bombay Deccan. Almost two-thirds of the harvest was lost in nine Maharashtran districts affecting 8 million people, with virtually no crop at all in Sholapur and Kaladgi. The disaster befell a peasantry already ground down by exorbitant taxation and extortionate debt. In the Ahmednagar region officials reported that no less than three-fifths of the peasantry was "hopelessly indebted," while in Sholapur the district officer had warned his superiors in May 1875: "I see no reason to doubt the fact stated to me by many apparently trustworthy witnesses and which my own personal observation confirms, that in many cases the assessments are only paid by selling ornaments or cattle." (As Jairus Banaji comments, "A household without cattle was a household on the verge of extinction.") Ahmednagar with Poona had been the center of the famous Deccan Riots in May-June 1875, when ryots beat up moneylenders and destroyed debt records.

    While British procrastination was sacrificing charity to their savage god, the Invisible Hand, tens of thousands of these destitute villagers were voting with their feet and fleeing to Hyderabad, where the Nazim was providing assistance to famine victims. A large part of Sholapur was depopulated before British officials managed to organize relief works. Then, as a horrified British journalist discovered, they turned away anyone who was too starved to undertake hard coolie labor. But even "the labour test imposed upon the able-bodied," the correspondent noted, "is found to be too heavy for their famished frames; the wages paid are inadequately low; in many districts all who are willing to work do not find employment.... No arrangements have been made to preserve the cattle by providing fodder or pasture lands. No grain stores have been collected or charity houses opened for the infirm and the aged." The only recourse for the young, the infirm and the aged was therefore to attempt the long trek to Hyderabad — an ordeal that reportedly killed most of them.

    Widespread unemployment and the high price of grain, meanwhile, brought the spectre of hunger even into districts where rainfall had been adequate. As a result, several million emaciated laborers and poor peasants overwhelmed the relief works belatedly authorized by the Bombay and Madras governments. At the beginning of February, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, Sir Richard Temple, was sent south as plenipotentiary Famine Delegate by Lytton to clamp down on the "out of control" expenditures that threatened the financing of the planned invasion of Afghanistan. Although the viceroy had also skirmished bitterly with Sir Philip Wodehouse, the governor of Bombay, over Calcutta's refusal to subsidize large-scale relief works during the fall of 1876, his greatest indignation was directed at Buckingham for making "public charity indiscriminate" in Bellary, Cuddapah and Kurnool, where one-quarter of the population was employed breaking stone or digging canals.

    Temple was a shrewd choice as Lytton's enforcer. Earlier, in 1873-74, he had followed Salisbury's urgings and dealt aggressively with a drought that severely damaged the harvest throughout most of Bengal and Bihar. Importing half a million tons of rice from Burma, he provided life-saving subsistence, both through relief works and a "gratuitous dole," which forestalled mass mortality. Indeed, the official record claimed only twenty-three starvation deaths. It was the only truly successful British relief effort in the nineteenth century and might have been celebrated as a template for dealing with future emergencies. Instead, Temple came under withering fire from London for the "extravagance" of allowing "the scale of wages paid at relief works to be determined by the daily food needs of the labourer and the prevailing food prices in the market rather than by the amount that the Government could afford to spend for the purpose." In public, he was lambasted by The Economist for encouraging indolent Indians to believe that "it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive." Senior civil servants, convinced (according to Lord Salisbury) that it was "a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows," denounced the relief campaign as "pure Fourierism." Temple's career was almost ruined.

    In 1877 the thoroughly chastened lieutenant-governor, "burning to retrieve his reputation for extravagance in the last famine," had become the implacable instrument of Lytton's frugality. The viceroy boasted to the India Office that he could not have found "a man more likely, or better able to help us save money in famine management." Indeed, The Times was soon marveling at the "pliability" of his character: "Sir Richard Temple, whether rightly or wrongly, has the reputation of having a mind so plastic and principles so facile that he can in a moment change front and adopt most contradictory lines of policy. His course in the famine districts certainly seems to bear this out, for he is even more strict than the Supreme Government in enforcing a policy which differs in every respect from that which he himself practised in Behar three years ago."

    Although Victoria in her message to the Imperial Assemblage had reassured Indians that their "happiness, prosperity and welfare" were the "present aims and objects of Our Empire," Temple's brief from the Council of India left no ambiguity about the government's true priorities: "The task of saving life irrespective of cost, is one which it is beyond our power to undertake. The embarrassment of debt and weight of taxation consequent on the expense thereby involved would soon become more fatal than the famine itself." Likewise, the viceroy insisted that Temple everywhere in Madras "tighten the reins." The famine campaign in Lytton's conception was a semi-military demonstration of Britain's necessary guardianship over a people unable to help themselves, not an opportunity for Indian initiative or self-organization. If, as a modern authority on famine emphasizes, "emergency relief, like development aid, is only truly effective if the recipients have the power to determine what it is and how it is used," Temple's perverse task was to make relief as repugnant and ineffective as possible. In zealously following his instructions to the letter, he became to Indian history what Charles Edward Trevelyan — permanent secretary to the Treasury during the Great Hunger (and, later, governor of Madras) — had become to Irish history: the personification of free market economics as a mask for colonial genocide.

    In a lightning tour of the famished countryside of the eastern Deccan, Temple purged a half million people from relief work and forced Madras to follow Bombay's precedent of requiring starving applicants to travel to dormitory camps outside their locality for coolie labor on railroad and canal projects. The deliberately cruel "distance test" refused work to able-bodied adults and older children within a ten-mile radius of their homes. Famished laborers were also prohibited from seeking relief until "it was certified that they had become indigent, destitute and capable of only a modicum of labour." Digby later observed that Temple "went to Madras with the preconceived idea that the calamity had been exaggerated, that it was being inadequately met, and that, therefore, facts were, unconsciously may be, squared with this theory.... He expected to see a certain state of things, and he saw that — that and none other."

    In a self-proclaimed Benthamite "experiment" that eerily prefigured later Nazi research on minimal human subsistence diets in concentration camps, Temple cut rations for male coolies, whom he compared to "a school full of refractory children," down to one pound of rice per diem despite medical testimony that the ryots — once "strapping fine fellows" — were now "little more than animated skeletons ... utterly unfit for any work." (Noting that felons traditionally received two pounds of rice per day, one district official suggested that "it would be better to shoot down the wretches than to prolong their misery in the way proposed.") The same reduced ration had been introduced previously by General Kennedy (another acerbic personality, "not personally popular even in his own department") in the Bombay Deccan, and Madras's sanitary commissioner, Dr. Cornish, was "of the opinion that `experiment' in that case [meant] only slow, but certain starvation." Apart from its sheer deficiency in energy, Cornish pointed out that the exclusive rice ration without the daily addition of protein-rich pulses (dal), fish or meat would lead to rapid degeneration. Indeed, as the lieutenant-governor was undoubtedly aware, the Indian government had previously fixed the minimum shipboard diet of emigrant coolies "living in a state of quietude" at twenty ounces of rice plus one pound of dal, mutton, vegetables and condiment. In the event, the "Temple wage," as it became known, provided less sustenance for hard labor than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of the modern caloric standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government.

Interviews with Loretta Napoleoni, author of Rogue Economics

Amy Goodman interviews Loretta Napoleoni for Democracy Now!


Greg Palast interviews Loretta Napoleoni

Is the missing Queen Elizabeth Park statue bound for China?

The theft of a life-size bronze statue in Queen Elizabeth Park is only the latest in a series of brazen metal thefts taking place in cities around the world.

Sometime Thursday night or Friday morning, thieves carted away a woman who was part of a public-art exhibit of three statues: a camerman, a couple, and a woman who were all being photographed in the park.

Metal thefts of this nature were described in detail in Loretta Napoleoni's recent book, Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality. She suggested that the metal thefts, including manhole covers in various cities, were being turned into scrap to feed China's insatiable desire for steel.

Vancouver police Const. Tim Fanning was quoted in today's Province newspaper asking, "Why now?"

An article published in the International Herald Tribune on March 28 provides some answers to that question, citing manhole thefts in many cities around the world, and Chinese buyers lining up to buy the scrap metal.

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'The whole situation is akin to the Salem witchtrials which took place in the late 17th century in the US'

Blasphemy sentence

 

A district and sessions court in Sialkot has handed out a death sentence under the country's controversial blasphemy law to a man accused of desecrating the Holy Quran. What is particularly disturbing is that the judge delivered his ruling in a highly charged atmosphere, with banners and posters displayed everywhere and protesters seeking death gathering at the court where a high level of security had to be put in place to protect the accused man. This pattern is one that has been seen repeatedly over the last few years. Each accusation of blasphemy is followed frequently by a frenzy often built up by extremist groups, which builds pressure on both police and judges. Certainly, few district court judges are willing in the face of such intimidation to rule in favour of any person accused of blasphemy. The whole situation is akin to the Salem witchtrials which took place in the late 17th century in the US. It is unfortunate we have not moved beyond this period in terms of development.

The blasphemy law, which is included in several sections of Pakistan's penal code was widely used and made harsher during the 1980s, under the regime of the late General Ziaul Haq. Over the last decade, its misuse has been widespread, most often as a means to settle petty scores. Muslims and non-Muslims have both suffered as a result. Dozens remain jailed, some have been killed in prison and others have found that even after acquittal by higher courts they are unable to live safely in the country. More dangerous still is the mindset created by this law with mob killings becoming a reality. Only months ago, a Hindu factory worker accused of uttering blasphemous words was killed by fellow workers, allegedly watched by police who failed to act.

Efforts made to introduce safeguards within the blasphemy law, including a 2004 alteration requiring investigation by a senior police official of all such cases have proved largely ineffective. The misuse of the law has been criticized by international and local rights organizations. It was time the blasphemy law was amended to offer adequate safeguards to victims and steps put in place to prevent the blatant misuse of the provision that takes places today and which only serves to further increase the prevailing culture of intolerance and bigotry.

 

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