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Lessons from the Great Irish Famine [1845–1850] Nineteenth-century Ireland and Modern Africa There are subtle lessons to be found in comparing the Great Famine with colonial and postcolonial Africa. These include, as we have discussed in chapters 6 and 7, echoes from the Great Famine found in both the predisposing and catalytic factors that have caused the more recent starvations in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Niger. We also find some commonalities between the plights of the Irish and of Africans. And we learn that chronic hunger, malnutrition, starvation, and famine are equal opportunity killers, particularly of children. Starvation and famine may be unpredictable, however; they may strike those who are not only poor, but also (in Cormac Ó Gráda’s words), “desperately unlucky.”1 But the fundamental commonality of the politics of starvation is not age or gender, or the color of someone’s skin, or even the ethnicity or geography of one’s community. It is the depth and persistence of poverty. Poverty, along with its attendant chronic hunger, malnutrition, and disease, seeps quietly into the farthest corners of the world. In Europe today Italy has the highest rate of child poverty, followed by Great Britain, where one child in four lives below that nation’s poverty line; half the children in Inner London live in poverty.2 In the United States, at this writing, one child in every fifty (1,555,360 American children) is homeless;3 17 million children—more than one in five—live in families where food is scarce;4 one person in every eight goes to bed hungry each night.5 The Great Irish Famine teaches us about assumptions, the concept of “the other,” and about racism. One might argue that there are no connections— indeed, that there are fundamental dissimilarities—between the Irish Famine and the famines of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries addressed in this book. After all, the Irish Famine was “Europe’s last famine,” whereas starvation and famine continue today across the developing world. But it would be superficial to say that the Irish Famine struck down “Europeans” (that is, “white” people), whereas contemporary starvations and famines afflict only “people of color.” Closer examination indicates a universality of suffering. We may start with the trans-Atlantic trade in human beings. For two centuries, in addition to African slaves, Europeans—mostly Irish, Scots, English, and Germans—were 180 [] the genesis of response taken to the Caribbean, Brazil, and the British colonies in substantial numbers. They shared a common experience. Perhaps as many as two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were indentured servants; in some colonies, they made up 75 percent of the people living there. Just ten years after the Great Irish Famine, the 1860 U.S. Census identified 393,975 individuals who owned 3,950,528 slaves. Enough of them were not Africans to cause W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a famous African American, to look at the wider framework of the Atlantic trade in human beings and write: “Any attempt to consider the attitude of the English colonies toward the African slave-trade must be prefaced by a word as to the attitude of England herself and the development of the trade in her hands.”6 The British played a major role in the Atlantic slave trade, starting in 1562 and continuing into the nineteenth century. That shameful history is well documented,7 but what concerns us here is British colonization of Ireland and the West Indies, the so-called “white Atlantic slave trade.” In 1649, Oliver Cromwelltookanarmyof 20,000intoIrelandanddroveIrishlandownersfromseveral million acres of arable land. He installed his soldiers on large estates and his son, Henry, in command of the English soldiers. The system of “plantations” linked Ireland with the West Indies island colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, St. Kitts, and Trinidad, and then with the North American mainland. Both the Irish and West Indies plantations demanded labor, however obtained. To meet this demand, large numbers of African slaves were sent to the New World, averaging 50,000 annually from about 1680 to 1786. Some scholars estimate that more than 2 million African slaves were shipped into the British West Indies alone. Joining them were enslaved Irish peasants. Under Henry Cromwell’s command , any Irish man, woman, or child found east of the river Shannon was arrested and sold into slavery in the West Indies; when that happened, the person was said to have been “barbado’ed...

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