Human Encumbrances
369 pages
English

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369 pages
English
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The history of the Great Irish Famine has been mired in debate over the level of culpability of the British government. Most scholars reject the extreme nationalist charge of genocide, but beyond that there is little consensus. In Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine, David Nally argues for a nuanced understanding of “famineogenic behavior”—conduct that aids and abets famine—capable of drawing distinctions between the consequences of political indifference and policies that promote reckless conduct.

Human Encumbrances is the first major work to apply the critical perspectives of famine theory and postcolonial studies to the causes and history of the Great Famine. Combining an impressive range of archival sources, including contemporary critiques of British famine policy, Nally argues that land confiscations and plantation schemes paved the way for the reordering of Irish political, social, and economic space. According to Nally, these colonial policies undermined rural livelihoods and made Irish society more vulnerable to catastrophic food crises. He traces how colonial ideologies generated negative evaluations of Irish destitution and attenuated calls to implement traditional anti-famine programs. The government's failure to take action, born out of an indifference to the suffering of the Irish poor, amounted to an avoidable policy of “letting die.”


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Publié par
Date de parution 15 avril 2011
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780268087609
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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D A V I D P . N A L L Y
HUMAN ENCUMBRANCES Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine
H u m a n E n c u m b r a n c e s
D A V I D P . N A L L Y
Human Encumbrances
Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine
U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O T R E D A M E P R E S S
N O T R E D A M E , I N D I A N A
Copyright © 2011 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nally, David P. Human encumbrances : political violence and the Great Irish Famine / David P. Nally. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03608-9 ( paper : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-03608-X ( paper : alk. paper) 1. Ireland — History — Famine, 1845 –1852. 2. Famines — Political aspects — Ireland — History —19th century. 3. Poverty — Political aspects — Ireland — History —19th century. 4. Ireland — Rural conditions. 5. Ireland — Colonial influence. 6. Political violence — Ireland — History — 19th century. 7. Social control — Ireland — History —19th century. 8. Great Britain — Colonies —Administration — History —19th century. 9. Great Britain — Foreign economic relations — Ireland. 10. Ireland Foreign economic relations — Great Britain. I. Title. DA950.7.N35 2011 941.5081— dc22 2010052723
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
       
Preface Acknowledgments
Introduction: Colonial Biopolitics and the Functions of Famine
   Fatal Circumstances: Colonialism and the Origins of Vulnerability to Famine
   Defining Civility: On the Poverty of Others      Engineering Civility: Colonial Welfare and Irish Pauper Management     Imposing Civility: The Administration of Hunger
    The “ungoverned millions”: Thomas Carlyle and the Irish Question
   The Angel of Progress: Visionary Geographies and Disaster Triage
Notes Bibliography Index
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1
21
57
95
129
175
203
232 302 336
Famines are wars over the right to existence. Mike Davis,Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
      
The vice which is inherent in our system of social and political economy is so subtle that it eludes all pursuit, that you cannot find or trace it to any responsible source. The man, indeed, over whose dead body the coroner holds an inquest, has been mur-dered, but no one killed him. There is no external wound, there is no symptom of internal disease. Society guarded him against all outward violence;— it merely en-circled him around in order to keep up what is termed the regular current of trade, and then political economy, with an invisible hand, applied the air-pump to the nar-row limits within which he was confined, and exhausted the atmosphere of his physi-cal life. Who did it? No one did it, and yet it was done. — John Hughes,A Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847
“I got to figure,” the tenant said. “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.” — John Steinbeck,The Grapes of Wrath
This book begins from the position that both the genesis and eects of food crises, like the construction of food systems themselves, ought to be analysed and understood from within “the political realm of human aairs.” This phrase is gleaned from the political writings of Hannah Arendt, for whom “neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon.” While Arendt insisted that “violence” and “power” are far from the same thing, she also admitted that nothing is more com-mon than to find both forces operating in concert. “ Even the most
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despotic domination we know of,” she cautioned, “the rule of master over slaves, who always outnumbered him, did not rest on superior means of coercion as such, but on a superior organisation of power 1 that is, on the organized solidarity of the masters.” Arendt’s comments, I want to suggest, provide an im portant background for understanding the nature of “political violence” and its role in the creation of famine. A person or population can be “domi-nated” through brute force, but they might also be dehumanised or re-duced to a position of virtual rightlessness through harmful economic policies, debilitating institutional programmes, prejudicial legislative actions, or misguided political doctrines. In the first example, subju-gation would require the repressive presence of a police force or an army; in the second instance, domination is achieved through greater organisation and political design, or what Arendt termed the “solidar-ity of the masters.” This typology of political violence provides a helpful way to think about mass starvation. It is relatively easy, for example, to find cases where famines are the direct outcome of brute force. In the medieval period the ritual of “slash and burn” practised by retreating armies is an obvious case in point. And the ongoing crisis in Sudan provides a more recent illustration of the synergies between armed conflict and mass starvation. The violence of hunger can result from other sources, however, including, for instance, colonial policies, market crises, state and corporate food control, inequitable labour regimes, and so forth. These examples of “structural violence,” to use Paul Farmer’s helpful term, might not appear as obvious as a civil war or an armed conflict, but evidence shows that they are in fact a more common cause of 2 protracted famine. And herein lies the crux of a larger problem: not only are struc-tural factors more dicult to identify, theircomplexandcompositenature makes it very dicult to isolate and distinguish the parties responsible. To view, say, a bureaucratic system as the principal cause of a particu-lar famine can generate the false view that neither agency nor design is involved in the catastrophe. This is not just a problem for scholars to ponder, as Pierre Spitz makes clear. Certain mechanisms like taris, poll taxes, rent systems, and usurious credit practices are easily iden-
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tified as “extractive forces” that strip populations of their assets, leav-3 ing scarcity and hunger in their wake. In these situations the popula-tions directly aected are usually able to identify those responsible that is, tax collectors, moneylenders, large farmers, and landlords — a fact that explains why these figures are very often the target of agrarian violence. The complex character of other kinds of extractive forces, however (for example, price structures, declining terms of trade, or the rising costs of farm inputs), makes them far less easy to analyse and identify. In other words, the multifaceted and compound nature of political violence often renders its operations opaque. Whilst the complexity of political violence needs to be recog-nised — and we owe a debt to Spitz, amongst others, for pointing this out — it would be wrong to deduce from this, as is often the case, that 4 food crises simply happen. In his excellent bookThe End of Food,Paul Roberts, drawing on John Thackara’s work on urban sprawl, makes a very powerful point about food crises that is worth quoting at length:
Nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens or so it seems . . . On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its devel-opment. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legis-lators, low density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by econo-mists, credit lines designed by banks . . . data mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behaviour are complicated and hard to understand — but the poli-5 cies are not the result of chance.
For Roberts, food crises, like the phenomenon of urban sprawl, are the outcome of a complex political process. Disasters do not happen; they are designed. Behind the structural causes of hunger lie the machina-tions of politicians, legislators, workhouse guardians, usurious credi-tors, apathetic landowners, and utopian economists. The challenge is to determine the key sites of agency and action from the “sprawl” of compound forces.
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