Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (review)

Recent work on the Irish famine has moved away from the revisionist notion that British officials cannot be faulted for their failure to relieve Irish hunger. Instead, historians now blame laissez-faire economics. Nally, a geographer, contributes to this literature with an interdisciplinary methodology. Drawing on copious primary sources to create a searing portrayal of Irish poverty, Nally's work is a thorough account of the famine in a long-term perspective that places it in a contemporary theoretical and postcolonial framework. One great strength of this book is that Nally embeds the famine in comparative studies, drawing on the work of Sen and others, who demonstrate that famines are the result of both crop failures and the inability of the poor to pay for food.¹

First, Nally takes a discursive approach, demonstrating that accounts of travelers, British officials, and such intellectuals as Thomas Carlyle created an image of the Irish people as primitive and barbaric. This is not an original observation, but the detailed, vivid accounts of Irish poverty that Nally quotes are useful for those who study the Irish famine. Nally writes that the "the Irish poor emerged as objects of calculation rather than acting subjects," but he ignores their popular protests, a common failing in governmentality-centered research (96).

Second, Nally uses Foucault's paradigm of biopolitics to demonstrate that political economy did not only involve laissez-faire, that is, the government's refusal to intervene, but also the government's attempt to reshape Irish society and landholding.² The British imposed centralizing governmental initiatives, such as a national primary-education system and a poor law. Nally draws on the work of postcolonial scholars to analyze nineteenth-century Ireland as a "site for exploitation" as well as "a laboratory for modernity," and he demonstrates how scholars of Ireland, such as McDonagh, have applied this insight to delineate the extension and centralization of government in early nineteenth-century Ireland.³ Nally's claim that the Irish poor law was fundamentally different from the English poor law is an overstatement, as he later acknowledges: The Irish poor law was much harsher in denying a right to relief, but it was based on the English New Poor Law's philosophy of limited eligibility and placing paupers under discipline in workhouses. Once the famine broke out, the government selectively applied laissez faire policies, for instance insisting that the Navigation Acts required exports and imports to be carried on British ships. The task-work system was also a way of enforcing proletarianization and labor discipline on the poor.

Finally, Nally draws on such theorists as Agamben. Generally, early nineteenth-century politicians wanted to manage Ireland in terms of biopolitics, imposing such discipline on the poor in order to "improve" the economy and make Ireland more governable. However, the famine turned Ireland into what Agamben calls a "state of exception" where normal ethical rules did not apply.⁴ Nally demonstrates that British policy transformed the biopolitics of managing populations into a "necro-politcs," borrowing Mbembé's phrase. The Irish were reduced to "bare life," in Agamben's terms, seen as bodies superfluous to the state's requirements, who could be allowed to die. Thus did the Irish become "human incumbrances" (230).⁵