8 ms·

Luck of the English: A new history shatters myths about an extraordinary nation

60 points by Petiver 11y ago

DrScump 11y ago
"The worst crop failure of them all would strike Ireland in the 1840s—the potato famine that still haunts that nation’s memory. The United Kingdom responded with the most ambitious program of food aid and cash relief ever attempted by any nation to that point, but one that still fell horribly short of the magnitude of the disaster. " That's quite a nationalist spin. In fact, England exported far more food from Ireland than it provided in aid of all kinds, even if you don't count the grain consumed in making exported alcohol. See http://www.usbornefamilytree.com/irishfoodexports.htm http://www.usbornefamilytree.com/irishfoodexports.htm or Wikipedia's article for references.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  And did the same in Indian during that time period. Having turned Britain's agriculture to wool and much of India's agricultural output to cotton, the British exported food from Indian to feed Britain while 15 million Indians starved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I... The British shot Indians caught trying to steal food from the docks. Mike Davis is the author who called it "Late Victorian Holocausts" referenced in the article. http://www.versobooks.com/books/150-late-victorian-holocausts http://www.versobooks.com/books/150-late-victorian-holocaust...
  - twilightfog 11y ago
    Another link on how British engineered the Bengal Famine Genocide in India: http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/ http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/ Winston Churchill casually diverted the supplies of medical aid and food that was being dispatched to the starving victims to the already well supplied soldiers of Europe. When entreated upon he said, "Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits." The Delhi Government sent a telegram painting to him a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of people who had died. His only response was, "Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    Or go back further, to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, where 10 million died in British India because the Brits had replaced too much of the food crop with cultivation of Opium to sell to China. Instead of relief from Britain the locals received aggressive tax collection to make up for the losses due to the famine. Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.
    - lmm 11y ago
      > Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII. How do the positives and negatives compare to self-governing nations of the same time period? Life in those eras was (to a modern mind) unimaginably cruel, and plenty of rulers plundered their own populations into starvation.
- pjc50 11y ago
  It is so misleading that it calls the whole thing, book and review, into question. Yes, the pendulum has swung from "yay, Empire!" to "boo, colonialism" and this book is trying to push it back; but that means we need a careful unravelling of the issues involved, probably attributing them more to the good and bad actions of individual people or groups than trying to answer the single question "England: Good or Bad?" Denying the role of English capitalist politics in worsening the potato famine is almost as bad as denying the holocaust. (I'd settle for "England: Not As Genocidal As Belgium")
  - arethuza 11y ago
    I could add: Scotland: We tried to have an Empire of our own, but failed. Amusingly, the organisation that was setup to administer the English bailout of the Scottish Darien colony scheme (one of the main benefits to Scots of the Union) went onto to become RBS which itself required a vast bailout a few centuries later... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
  - s_dev 11y ago
    This was the chap England thought best appropriate to handle the famine. "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. - Charles Trevelyan, head of administration for Irish famine relief, 1840s" He thought the famine would "thin" the population like you would do when maintaining a forest. It's borderline genocide.
    - sjcsjc 11y ago
      I take it this is the same Trevelyan of "Fields of Athenry" fame [1], a great rendition of which can be heard at the end of Veronica Guerin [2] 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Athenry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Athenry 2 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0312549/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0312549/
    - deleted 11y ago
- rmc 11y ago
  In fact, some historians and people think that what Britain did in Ireland in the famine amounts to genocide.
  - _ak 11y ago
    A major contributing factor to the famine was the dependence on potatoes as staple, combined with vast monocultures, the Irish Lumper potato variety in particular. Blight wasn't just an issue in Ireland, but also in the rest of Europe, but it only hit Ireland so hard because there was very little genetic variation. The outcome was grossly mismanaged, but most definitely does not amount to genocide, as the root cause for the potato famine was very much a home-grown problem. Ironically, some farmers in Northern Ireland started growing Irish Lumpers again, and with modern farming techniques and more variation on the fields, it grows just fine.
    - corin_ 11y ago
      Nobody is accusing Britain of creating the problem, just of letting it kill far more people than it could have.
      - tim333 11y ago
        The - Let's take all their land... Oops they've starved - thing did help create the problem. See also Tasmania.
    - ubernostrum 11y ago
      The "genocide" portion comes from the fact that: * Ireland's dependence on potatoes for subsistence was due to forcible appropriation of essentially all arable land by the English government, which redistributed it to absentee landlords. * Despite clear widespread famine conditions, England continued to export food out of Ireland and maintained an official policy of not intervening in the "free market" of Irish exports, at the documented cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. * Meanwhile the English government did see fit to interfere with foreign aid to Ireland and even actively refused large donations and shipments, allegedly on grounds that it would be insulting to English pride for other nations to do more than England itself.
- alimw 11y ago
  "The United Kingdom responded with the most ambitious program of food aid and cash relief ever attempted by any nation to that point" "In fact, England exported far more food from Ireland than it provided in aid of all kinds" Not sure why you'd think these two statements in conflict? Any aid effort would have been pushing against potent forces of capitalism.
peteretep 11y ago
> After all, they dominated > not only the U.K., but also > for much of the past 300 > years a vast global empire Fuck is this shit? The idea (and I say this as an Englishman) that the English dominated Scotland, or that the Scots (and Welsh) didn't play an oversize role in empire is nuts. The only people who seem to get excited about an England as distinct from the UK tend to be: Scottish, Irish, poor white racists (or all of the above). The only part of the British Isles with legitimate grievance against England is Ireland.
- JetSetWilly 11y ago
  I don't think the article mentioned England dominating Scotland in the sense you mean. However, so you deny that the nation comprising 90% of the UK's population thus dominated its imperial adventures and also dominates its national politics? The UK must be a very odd country.
  - mousetummy 11y ago
    The UK is a very odd country politically. Two of the last three UK prime ministers (Blair and Brown) were Scottish. The third, Cameron is (partly) of Scottish descent, Cameron being a Scottish surname. Scottish people appear to be rather over represented in UK history, politics, and culture given their relative population, for whatever reason.
    - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      The usual explanation is that a quirk of politics and religion led to a more democratic nation with a remarkably high literacy rate, which catapulted Scotland from poverty to wealth.
    - JetSetWilly 11y ago
      Cameron isn't actually Scottish, having a distant ancestor doesn't make you so. Tony Blair was not really Scottish either - although at least he was of a Scottish background. He did go to a Scottish school, and was born there, but crucially he didn't self-identify as Scottish and certainly didn't have a Scottish accent - he was mostly raised in Durham and that was how he self-identified. I've found that people who promote Blair and even Cameron as Scottish without mentioning that actually they think themselves English tend to be nursing a grievance against Scotland for whatever reason. Otherwise we have Brown who was unequivocally Scottish and was often attacked on that basis during his premiership ("One-eyed Scottish Idiot" etc). Otherwise in the 20th Century we have James Ramsay MacDonald (1930s for 6 years), Lord Douglas-Home (a year and a half in the 1960s), Henry Campbell-Bannerman (2.5 years), and Arthur James Balfour (3.5 years). So 13 or 14 years of the 20th century, Britain suffered under Scottish prime ministers, only slightly above what we might expect given Scotland's share of the population of the UK - this could be explained by Scotland then-increased share of MPs. It doesn't seem that Scotland dominates UK politics more than any other nation. However, it is certainly noticed and commented upon or even resented when Scottish people rise to high office, perhaps that's why it may seem so to some. In the current political climate with the domination of the SNP, it seems like the possibility of Scottish MPs attaining any kind of high office, membership of the cabinet, or part of the governance of the UK has entirely vanished for generations with who-knows-what consequences for the union in the future.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
This article seems to switch between 'Britain' and 'England' haphazardly, as in this example: "What was distinctively English was the determined and costly campaign against the slave trade led by the British state"
- bboreham 11y ago
  I don't think it's haphazard; much of TFA's point is that people don't make the distinction correctly. So, here, it's saying that few Scots/Welsh/etc were involved in fighting the slave trade, politically.
allendoerfer 11y ago
> But since poor East Germany rejoined West Germany in 1990, England no longer lags far behind Germany. Depending on which numbers you use, the English parts of the United Kingdom may already exceed Germany in GDP per capita. If recent trends continue, the U.K. as a whole could even overtake Germany in gross output by the year 2030. So after 2008/2009, when everything Germany did was great and everything England did was bad, because the crisis affected Germany much less than England, we are now back to extrapolating, after London got back on its feet? In 2015 1.1 million people fled to Germany and birth-rates are rising. For me long-term estimates of economic numbers (which are largely based on demographic estimates) seem like complete guessings, because we simply do not know how this will play out.
- douche 11y ago
  Assuming all of those immigrants integrate successfully into German culture and there is no widespread right-wing backlash...
  - TheGirondin 11y ago
    Assuming all of those immigrants want to integrate into German culture and there is no widespread religious backlash against secular culture.
mcguire 11y ago
I'm a bit lost here, between the article and this discussion; I'd really appreciate it if someone could set me straight: It seems that the English oppressed the Irish (the "800 year occupation"), the British oppressed the English, the Scots were paid by the British to oppress everyone else, and the Welsh (I just finished watching Hinterland) look like they've had their last puppy kicked. (Am I wrong in believing Wales to be the northern European equivalent of West Virginia, with a lot of hills and mines and a lot of people without shoes or teeth, where nothing pleasant ever happens?) Oh, and Northern Ireland is an extension of England (although the inhabitants are mostly Scottish) that has been declared a country, for taxation purposes I assume. As I understand it, the Cornish don't exist any more except as place-names (understandable, given that Wikipedia says, "It continues to be occupied by Neolithic and then Bronze Age peoples"), and the Kents never did exist. (But what about the Brigantes tribe from 62 Wallaby Street?) Honestly, the closest analogy this intellect-deprived American can come up with for the article is whether Virginians are a large, nationless group of people in North America. So, ok, here's my question. Can anyone lay their hands on two-three of these British folks? They sound like real bad-asses. With them, we should be able to set the world to right in a jif, what?

60 points by Petiver 11y ago

"The worst crop failure of them all would strike Ireland in the 1840s—the potato famine that still haunts that nation’s memory. The United Kingdom responded with the most ambitious program of food aid and cash relief ever attempted by any nation to that point, but one that still fell horribly short of the magnitude of the disaster. " That's quite a nationalist spin. In fact, England exported far more food from Ireland than it provided in aid of all kinds, even if you don't count the grain consumed in making exported alcohol. See http://www.usbornefamilytree.com/irishfoodexports.htm http://www.usbornefamilytree.com/irishfoodexports.htm or Wikipedia's article for references.

SixSigma 11y ago
And did the same in Indian during that time period. Having turned Britain's agriculture to wool and much of India's agricultural output to cotton, the British exported food from Indian to feed Britain while 15 million Indians starved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I... The British shot Indians caught trying to steal food from the docks. Mike Davis is the author who called it "Late Victorian Holocausts" referenced in the article. http://www.versobooks.com/books/150-late-victorian-holocausts http://www.versobooks.com/books/150-late-victorian-holocaust...
- twilightfog 11y ago
  Another link on how British engineered the Bengal Famine Genocide in India: http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/ http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/ Winston Churchill casually diverted the supplies of medical aid and food that was being dispatched to the starving victims to the already well supplied soldiers of Europe. When entreated upon he said, "Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits." The Delhi Government sent a telegram painting to him a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of people who had died. His only response was, "Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Or go back further, to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, where 10 million died in British India because the Brits had replaced too much of the food crop with cultivation of Opium to sell to China. Instead of relief from Britain the locals received aggressive tax collection to make up for the losses due to the famine. Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.
  - lmm 11y ago
    > Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII. How do the positives and negatives compare to self-governing nations of the same time period? Life in those eras was (to a modern mind) unimaginably cruel, and plenty of rulers plundered their own populations into starvation.
pjc50 11y ago
It is so misleading that it calls the whole thing, book and review, into question. Yes, the pendulum has swung from "yay, Empire!" to "boo, colonialism" and this book is trying to push it back; but that means we need a careful unravelling of the issues involved, probably attributing them more to the good and bad actions of individual people or groups than trying to answer the single question "England: Good or Bad?" Denying the role of English capitalist politics in worsening the potato famine is almost as bad as denying the holocaust. (I'd settle for "England: Not As Genocidal As Belgium")
- arethuza 11y ago
  I could add: Scotland: We tried to have an Empire of our own, but failed. Amusingly, the organisation that was setup to administer the English bailout of the Scottish Darien colony scheme (one of the main benefits to Scots of the Union) went onto to become RBS which itself required a vast bailout a few centuries later... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
- s_dev 11y ago
  This was the chap England thought best appropriate to handle the famine. "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. - Charles Trevelyan, head of administration for Irish famine relief, 1840s" He thought the famine would "thin" the population like you would do when maintaining a forest. It's borderline genocide.
  - sjcsjc 11y ago
    I take it this is the same Trevelyan of "Fields of Athenry" fame [1], a great rendition of which can be heard at the end of Veronica Guerin [2] 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Athenry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Athenry 2 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0312549/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0312549/
  - deleted 11y ago
rmc 11y ago
In fact, some historians and people think that what Britain did in Ireland in the famine amounts to genocide.
- _ak 11y ago
  A major contributing factor to the famine was the dependence on potatoes as staple, combined with vast monocultures, the Irish Lumper potato variety in particular. Blight wasn't just an issue in Ireland, but also in the rest of Europe, but it only hit Ireland so hard because there was very little genetic variation. The outcome was grossly mismanaged, but most definitely does not amount to genocide, as the root cause for the potato famine was very much a home-grown problem. Ironically, some farmers in Northern Ireland started growing Irish Lumpers again, and with modern farming techniques and more variation on the fields, it grows just fine.
  - corin_ 11y ago
    Nobody is accusing Britain of creating the problem, just of letting it kill far more people than it could have.
    - tim333 11y ago
      The - Let's take all their land... Oops they've starved - thing did help create the problem. See also Tasmania.
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    The "genocide" portion comes from the fact that: * Ireland's dependence on potatoes for subsistence was due to forcible appropriation of essentially all arable land by the English government, which redistributed it to absentee landlords. * Despite clear widespread famine conditions, England continued to export food out of Ireland and maintained an official policy of not intervening in the "free market" of Irish exports, at the documented cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. * Meanwhile the English government did see fit to interfere with foreign aid to Ireland and even actively refused large donations and shipments, allegedly on grounds that it would be insulting to English pride for other nations to do more than England itself.
alimw 11y ago
"The United Kingdom responded with the most ambitious program of food aid and cash relief ever attempted by any nation to that point" "In fact, England exported far more food from Ireland than it provided in aid of all kinds" Not sure why you'd think these two statements in conflict? Any aid effort would have been pushing against potent forces of capitalism.

peteretep 11y ago

> After all, they dominated > not only the U.K., but also > for much of the past 300 > years a vast global empire Fuck is this shit? The idea (and I say this as an Englishman) that the English dominated Scotland, or that the Scots (and Welsh) didn't play an oversize role in empire is nuts. The only people who seem to get excited about an England as distinct from the UK tend to be: Scottish, Irish, poor white racists (or all of the above). The only part of the British Isles with legitimate grievance against England is Ireland.

JetSetWilly 11y ago
I don't think the article mentioned England dominating Scotland in the sense you mean. However, so you deny that the nation comprising 90% of the UK's population thus dominated its imperial adventures and also dominates its national politics? The UK must be a very odd country.
- mousetummy 11y ago
  The UK is a very odd country politically. Two of the last three UK prime ministers (Blair and Brown) were Scottish. The third, Cameron is (partly) of Scottish descent, Cameron being a Scottish surname. Scottish people appear to be rather over represented in UK history, politics, and culture given their relative population, for whatever reason.
  - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    The usual explanation is that a quirk of politics and religion led to a more democratic nation with a remarkably high literacy rate, which catapulted Scotland from poverty to wealth.
  - JetSetWilly 11y ago
    Cameron isn't actually Scottish, having a distant ancestor doesn't make you so. Tony Blair was not really Scottish either - although at least he was of a Scottish background. He did go to a Scottish school, and was born there, but crucially he didn't self-identify as Scottish and certainly didn't have a Scottish accent - he was mostly raised in Durham and that was how he self-identified. I've found that people who promote Blair and even Cameron as Scottish without mentioning that actually they think themselves English tend to be nursing a grievance against Scotland for whatever reason. Otherwise we have Brown who was unequivocally Scottish and was often attacked on that basis during his premiership ("One-eyed Scottish Idiot" etc). Otherwise in the 20th Century we have James Ramsay MacDonald (1930s for 6 years), Lord Douglas-Home (a year and a half in the 1960s), Henry Campbell-Bannerman (2.5 years), and Arthur James Balfour (3.5 years). So 13 or 14 years of the 20th century, Britain suffered under Scottish prime ministers, only slightly above what we might expect given Scotland's share of the population of the UK - this could be explained by Scotland then-increased share of MPs. It doesn't seem that Scotland dominates UK politics more than any other nation. However, it is certainly noticed and commented upon or even resented when Scottish people rise to high office, perhaps that's why it may seem so to some. In the current political climate with the domination of the SNP, it seems like the possibility of Scottish MPs attaining any kind of high office, membership of the cabinet, or part of the governance of the UK has entirely vanished for generations with who-knows-what consequences for the union in the future.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

This article seems to switch between 'Britain' and 'England' haphazardly, as in this example: "What was distinctively English was the determined and costly campaign against the slave trade led by the British state"

bboreham 11y ago
I don't think it's haphazard; much of TFA's point is that people don't make the distinction correctly. So, here, it's saying that few Scots/Welsh/etc were involved in fighting the slave trade, politically.

allendoerfer 11y ago

> But since poor East Germany rejoined West Germany in 1990, England no longer lags far behind Germany. Depending on which numbers you use, the English parts of the United Kingdom may already exceed Germany in GDP per capita. If recent trends continue, the U.K. as a whole could even overtake Germany in gross output by the year 2030. So after 2008/2009, when everything Germany did was great and everything England did was bad, because the crisis affected Germany much less than England, we are now back to extrapolating, after London got back on its feet? In 2015 1.1 million people fled to Germany and birth-rates are rising. For me long-term estimates of economic numbers (which are largely based on demographic estimates) seem like complete guessings, because we simply do not know how this will play out.

douche 11y ago
Assuming all of those immigrants integrate successfully into German culture and there is no widespread right-wing backlash...
- TheGirondin 11y ago
  Assuming all of those immigrants want to integrate into German culture and there is no widespread religious backlash against secular culture.

mcguire 11y ago

I'm a bit lost here, between the article and this discussion; I'd really appreciate it if someone could set me straight: It seems that the English oppressed the Irish (the "800 year occupation"), the British oppressed the English, the Scots were paid by the British to oppress everyone else, and the Welsh (I just finished watching Hinterland) look like they've had their last puppy kicked. (Am I wrong in believing Wales to be the northern European equivalent of West Virginia, with a lot of hills and mines and a lot of people without shoes or teeth, where nothing pleasant ever happens?) Oh, and Northern Ireland is an extension of England (although the inhabitants are mostly Scottish) that has been declared a country, for taxation purposes I assume. As I understand it, the Cornish don't exist any more except as place-names (understandable, given that Wikipedia says, "It continues to be occupied by Neolithic and then Bronze Age peoples"), and the Kents never did exist. (But what about the Brigantes tribe from 62 Wallaby Street?) Honestly, the closest analogy this intellect-deprived American can come up with for the article is whether Virginians are a large, nationless group of people in North America. So, ok, here's my question. Can anyone lay their hands on two-three of these British folks? They sound like real bad-asses. With them, we should be able to set the world to right in a jif, what?