Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine by David P. Nally (review)

First a word of caution about the subtitle of this book; those looking for a discussion of political violence as normally conceived in a nineteenth-century Irish context will be disappointed. There is no significant examination here of violent acts by nationalist, rural radicals or the military forces of the state. This book promises, and offers, much more.

David P. Nally’s subject is well introduced in his frontispiece quotation from Mike Davis: “Famines are wars over the right to existence.” It is this most fundamental question of human rights, biological existence, that concerns Nally. His thesis is that the United Kingdom developed and followed a colonial ideology predicated upon the premise that “to be civilized Irish society must be anglicised, and for this to happen the soil must be swept of its human encumbrances.” A central feature of his analysis is the illumination of “the interaction between cognitive designs and human decisions—between ideology and conduct” (x).

Nally offers a useful correction to an interpretive challenge raised by historians—the need to avoid ahistorical moral or ethical judgments based upon modern sensibilities and ideologies. We do indeed need to understand the actions of individuals in terms of their historical, not our contemporary, context. But, as Nally argues, rather than preventing a consideration of moral and ethical issues, this historical scruple should provoke us to interrogate the moral and ethical dimensions of past time and place. And this is exactly what Nally does, first by exploring oppositional voices—both within and without government—that defended the “right to existence” against the new and radical concepts of property supremacy and political economy.

A second dimension of this ideological contextualization is Nally’s treatment of the well-worn topic of the triumph of laissez-faire theory during the middle years of the nineteenth century. He highlights the glaring inconsistency of successive administrations that blithely preached the virtues of limited government when dealing with issues of survival of the rural poor, but undertook a most radical and far-reaching state intervention into the social and economic structures of Irish society—a restructuring that consciously pursued a policy of removing the “human encumbrances” that stood in the way of a more effective form of exploiting Irish agricultural production for British needs. It was this goal of reforming “a rebarbative people … from subsistence farming to agrarian capitalism” that defines the “colonial biopolitics” that Nally pursues throughout this book (14, 15).

Nally devotes individual chapters to the definition of Ireland’s colonial status; the development through pamphlets, travel accounts, and official government reports of a discursive definition of Irish poverty; the development of the Irish Poor Law as a radical experiment in government intervention into biopolitics; the proactive and self-conscious role that famine relief played in reordering Irish society; Thomas Carlyle’s intervention into this realm; and, finally, the lasting devastation caused by the “famineogenic behaviour” of the state during the Famine era (227). Along the way Nally engages with the contributions of most of the major scholars of famine experience including those not routinely connected to the Great Hunger such as James Scott, Amartya Sen, and Michel Foucault.

In such an ambitious work some readers are likely to find small areas of imperfection. I was disappointed by Nally’s use of visual material. There are numerous illustrations, but Nally does not expend much effort in reading them. For example, he provides several illustrations to confirm the fascination of British observers with the extremes of Irish poverty, but he fails to explore the nuance of these illustrations or to reference counterexamples that could illustrate the sympathy and idealization that characterizes the work of other British artists. Examples of the first issue may be found in two illustrations of Irish poverty from John Barrow’s A Tour Around Ireland (1836). One image entitled “A Kerry cabin and its inhabitants” shows the entryway to...