Abstract
David Nally’s Human Encumbrances is a major contribution that can be appreciated at two basic levels. First, it smashes the still-pervasive narrative of the Great Irish Famine as a ‘natural disaster’, revealing it to be at once a culmination and an acceleration of a process of political violence. In this it steps boldly into intense, long-standing debates about the famine in Ireland. Second, on a broader level, both this case and Nally’s rigorous analysis and theoretical framework should interest scholars in agrarian studies, political ecology, and comparative colonial history.
The basic premise for the book, well established in critical famine research and historical political ecology, and authors like Amartya Sen and Mike Davis, is that food crises are deeply political events, in the sense of how uneven vulnerability was constructed beforehand and in the responses when chronic ill-health slips to emergency. In order to situate the Great Irish Famine historically, Nally is essentially dealing with the process of capitalist agrarian transformation under British colonial rule. He accomplishes this by carefully unpacking the reterritorialization of Ireland over time and the steady advance of market relations, which involved: the expropriation of vast areas of land for export-oriented estates; revolutionary changes in land tenure; the destruction of mostly self-provisioning small farms, craft industries, and traditional anti-scarcity systems; and the growing dependence of the poor on potato cultivation. In this, we see clearly how the rise of so-called ‘laissez-faire’ market economies was hardly a natural or inevitable process, but rather one that rested on wide-ranging political machinations and brute force. Karl Polanyi (1944) echoes very loudly.
Nally also pushes the historical foundations of the famine beyond political economy and into the realm of discursive regimes, and draws attention to their toxic interaction. British contempt for the Irish is shown in great detail, from the mocking of customs to loathing commentaries on domestic degeneracy, household organization, and personal hygiene, as it appeared in reams of official reports, news media, and other writing, set against some dissenting voices. The weight of these portrayals produced a widely held racial trope of the Irish as ignorant, idle, and filthy, which was further steeped in Malthusian imagery. Nally then convincingly demonstrates how this fed into the racialization of poverty, which served as a means for the British to deny the roles that land expropriation, displacement, evolving class relations, and marketization were playing in Ireland’s impoverishment, while simultaneously positioning colonial rule as ‘improvement’, bearing civility and modernization – a process undoubtedly familiar to scholars of European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Thus, amid dramatic accumulation by dispossession, marching westward over the course of centuries, the poor who were being dispossessed and forced to eke out increasingly precarious lives were at the same time being discursively transfigured into encumbrances to modernization, and the further advance of capitalist relations. As the famine unfolds, Nally shows how this discourse and ideology became even more virulent and thoroughly infected the politics of disaster response, both influencing and justifying the policies and institutions that were established.
One of the major arguments in Human Encumbrances is that the British response to Ireland’s food crisis between 1845 and 1849, when potato crops were repeatedly failing, must not be seen as simple neglect for Irish suffering, but the contrary: the famine was a period of massive state intervention. That is, while huge numbers of people were starving to death, important new policies and institutions were initiated not with humanitarian impulses, but to accelerate key facets of capitalist transformation that had been creeping forward under the long period of colonial rule. In this act of seizing political opportunity in crisis, Nally argues, we see an antecedent of ‘disaster capitalism’; smallholdings were swept away, consolidation was intensified, and the poor were left to die, migrate, or face a new form of social engineering, the workhouse. The workhouse, Nally argues, should be seen as a means through which the British regulated how the ‘deserving poor’ got turned into a working class, and how the deserving/undeserving line was drawn. He also provides a valuable theoretical lens for viewing this process of social engineering, drawing on Foucauldian conceptions of biopolitics, in order to show how the brutal conditions of the workhouse system amounted to an extension of political control into the management of life and body in profound new ways.
My main concerns with the book center on a few aspects of the analysis of agrarian change which could have been pushed further, though Nally’s central argument here – that this is foundational to understanding the famine – remains a thoroughly convincing one. One issue which, in my eyes, deserved more sustained attention was how Ireland’s economy fit within the British trading system, and the ‘veins’ of surplus extraction that ensued. Near the outset, Nally references a debate about the influence of Irish trade flows during the famine, and the scale of its exports amid such incredible suffering (pp. 11–12), but never takes it up in detail. Instead this debate, and the related dynamics before and after the famine re-emerge in small pockets, such as in comments like: Ireland was ‘feeding strangers on her soil’ (p. 21); Irish butter, cheese, beef, and fish was being exported to plantations in the Americas (pp. 33–34); the Irish diet had been ‘sacrificed to supply an export trade in cash crops and livestock’ (p. 42); Irish corn exports were feeding more than two million people in 1841 making it the ‘bread-basket of the UK’ (p. 50); and Irish exports were supplying more than four-fifths of the beef, butter, and pork in British cities in 1800 (p. 212). If these pockets had been given more coherence and detail – charting production and trade patterns clearly over the 19th century especially – it would have enriched the understanding of the process of agrarian change in Ireland and of the British motivations driving it.
This also intimately relates to consumption and dietary change in Britain, which I thought about in terms of Mintz’s (1985) connection of the violence of the colonial sugar plantation to the important function that sugar, tea, and coffee had in numbing the bellies of exploited European miners and factory workers. Might not the incredible dislocations in Ireland, which brought great volumes of Irish beef and other food staples to the British working poor, be viewed in a related light? Assessing the interrelation between agrarian change in Ireland and dietary change in Britain could also have been cast against the mythology of the British Beef-Eater as a source of its superior strength, and set as a precursor to the rise of the First International Food Regime after 1870, in which Britain had the central role linking the grain and livestock exports from temperate regions of North America, Australia, and southern South America to Europe (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989). Again, raising these ideas does not detract from Nally’s arguments, but rather suggests how the comparative value of this case might be further extended and located in the rise of the modern world system.
Finally, one thing I found myself itching for throughout was more attention to resistance, which appeared mainly as individual acts of subversion or dissent. As noted earlier, Nally shows so effectively how capitalist transformation in Ireland demanded much planning and repression by the state, as Polanyi famously argued. But, to follow another of Polanyi’s great insights, we might also view the historical advance of capitalism as a double movement, with pressure to deepen market relations from above inevitably meeting opposition from below. We see hints that resistance was welling up in decades prior to the famine (most notably in the fact that a sizable share of the British was stationed in Ireland for a long period), and it would have been helpful to have some indication of the nature and extent of oppositional movements. As it is, Human Encumbrances reveals a clear course from the foundation and expansion of the Pale to the Great Irish Famine, and that there was nothing ‘natural’ or inevitable about it; identifying the forms of organized resistance might have helped shed more light on what other courses were possible.
In suggesting a few areas that might have been more developed, I certainly do not mean to detract from the overall high quality of Human Encumbrances. While I am an outsider to Irish historical debates, I was left with a strong belief that this book has the power to radically reorient the course of scholarship on the Great Irish Famine, and through this eventually influence how it is taught and popularly perceived in Ireland. As noted at the outset, it also deserves a much wider readership. In drawing together close attention to political economy, the construction and influence of a racist/colonial discursive regime, and the biopolitics of social engineering in crisis, Nally provides a very rich and compelling interpretation of this case, and one which has obvious value for comparative historical understanding of agrarian change, dislocation, and food crises. It also offers a framework that can open new insights and questions for approaching these problems in the present, such as in the aggressive new phase of land-grabbing now unfolding. In the new land-grabs we are seeing what Sassen (2010: 24) calls ‘the most brutal sortings of winners and losers’ on a world scale, as finance capital is engaging in rising international investments in land across large areas of the South, which is inducing a new wave of forcible expulsions of the disposable poor. In other words, people are continuing to be transfigured into encumbrances to capital and modernization, and Nally’s contributions should resonate accordingly.