Abstract
The term governance is highly debated and contested. One definition is that it is the way in which authority is exercised. In his important new book David Nally write on the causes, nature and administration or governance of famine in Ireland in the 19th century. In the book Nally skilfully blends sophisticated theory with detailed empirics to produce a powerful analysis of the operation and impacts of colonial biopolitics.
There are brilliant descriptions of the contradictions of the colonial project – for example, how the Pale was ‘neither a perimeter nor a frontier’ but ‘an inside-outside dialectic’ that constructed differences between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarous’ precisely as it tried to erode those distinctions. Nally shows how Ireland reflected civilization ‘precisely by being the site of its absence’ (p. 72). ‘Civilization’ was then produced through its other, echoed in other colonial contexts as la mission civilisatrice.
The book is replete with new theoretical constructs such as the idea of ‘forced markets’, through land dispossession, also carried out in other colonies with similar deleterious effects. The invention of land as a fictitious commodity through enclosure then led to the development of labor as another fictitious commodity. However, because the development of manufacturing in Ireland was precluded by discriminatory legislation, such as the Navigation Acts, this structure created the appearance of ‘surplus labor’, or in the colonial formulation ‘surplus population’. The arrival of the potato blight served as a trigger event to reveal the structurally murderous nature of economic extraversion. However, in the colonial political economy the problem for the ruling elites became one of managing the ‘surplus’, ‘retrograde’ population.
Nally shows how, while non-intervention in the market was being preached, the famine was used to extend the power of the colonial state over segments of the Irish population through the workhouse system. This system was not designed to eliminate poverty, but pauperism, which could be a threat to political and economic ‘order’. At times there were more than a quarter of a million people resident in the workhouses.
Another important new idea in the book is that of ‘faminescapes’. In developing this concept, Nally shows how discourses have the ability to produce the objects they describe. For example, he notes that the label ‘pauper’ called forth a new institutional space (the workhouse) that was dedicated to population management, while contemporary depictions of Irish degeneracy supported the view that human sacrifices were needed. While some latter-day revisionist historians have equated 20th-century Irish nationalist appeals to ‘blood sacrifice’ with fascism, this discourse may have earlier origins in British management of Irish famine.
There seem to be similarities between the workhouse system and the concentrations camps in Nazi Germany, where some of the gates had arbeit macht frei or ‘work makes you free’ as a slogan. As Nally notes, ‘temporary relief measures’ in the form of workhouses, justified by ‘exceptional’ circumstances’, were directed at disciplining the social body rather than feeding starving bodies, even though an exasperated official protested that the problem was ‘food, not labor’. It is important to remember, however, that pauperism was subject to severe legal sanction in the UK ‘mainland’ at certain times and that workhouses were pioneered there. As such there was a diffusive classed and raced geography to these disciplinary institutions. The noted Africanist Bernard Magubane (1996) has argued that British rule in Ireland provided the template for apartheid in South Africa, where they developed concentration camps. Tracing these lineages might be a worthy topic for another book.
The workhouse was a seen as a solution to cultural failure and the laziness of the Irish. However, Nally superbly described why tenant farmers feared improvement, and so shunned it to avoid having to pay higher rents. This colonial ideology is echoed recently in the Africanist literature by calls for ‘cultural adjustment programmes’ (Chabal and Daloz, 1999).
One of the most shocking things to emerge from Nally’s account is the indifference and callousness of many policy-makers to the suffering of the Irish peasantry. Indeed many saw it as salutary. At times the colonial media, commentators and politicians spoke of Ireland as a terra nullius (empty land); at other times of Irish people as ‘mere animal vegetation’, not human life. One economist is reported to have said that ‘the famine would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good’ (Nassau Senior quoted in Nally, p. 211). On the other hand, there were those who were able to see the violence inherent in the structural power of capital. For example, Mitchel writing in The Nation wrote that ‘free trade and competition make the rich richer and the poor poorer’ and ‘make capital the absolute ruler of the world’ (quoted in Nally, p. 52).
Nally also implicitly develops new concepts. For example, while there has been much written about embedded energy and virtual water (such as the water used to grow our coffee), Nally talks about how much of Ireland’s potato crop was used to fatten livestock for export. The scale of both direct and indirect food exports from Ireland was striking, with the territory supplying over 80% of certain types of food, such as beef and pork, to British cities.
Implicitly drawing on theories of structural or silent violence he also shows how there is no strict separation between different types of violence. He skilfully describes how in the colonial political economy agrarian improvement superseded military force, with some of the same deadly effects. The London Times hoped that Irish people would become as rare in Ireland as Native Americans in North America. It seems like there might potentially be room here for further theoretical development about why and how this transition from direct to political violence took place. What was the role of land in relation to this reconstitution of state sovereignty? Was the famine the event that established market sovereignty in Ireland?
The Irish famine also arguably had global significance in the development of the ‘free market’. Nally also writes about how the Irish famine was used to argue against the Corn Laws in Britain, which had restricted imports, and were abolished in 1846. This may have also broader ideological effects. In earlier famine years in Ireland such as blian an air in the 18th century there was wide-scale private charity (Ó Gráda, 2009). Why was this not the case to the same extent during the Great Famine?
One of the most striking things to emerge from Nally’s book is the historical continuities between the way in which disasters can be put to certain actors’ advantage. As he notes, the Irish Famine was perhaps an early example of Naomi Klein’s ‘shock doctrine’, where a disaster is used to reorder society, along the lines envisaged by its most powerful members (Klein, 2007). Other historical continuities are also in evidence. For example, when Tony Blair declared in 2011 that Africa was a scar on the conscience of the world this echoed Lord Grey in 1846 who declared ‘Ireland is our disgrace’.
A stronger claim that Nally makes in the book is that disasters are designed. However, does this imply a level of intentionality that is difficult to prove? While the poverty and dependence that produced the famine were the outcomes of policies designed to promote accumulation in Britain and incorporate Ireland into its economy in a dependent manner, is it too strong to say that the famine was designed, even if it was seen as an opportunity to reorder society? If 90% of the land was in Protestant hands by 1778, what was the substantial advantage of the famine? It did of course lead to further major land-holding consolidation, or perhaps a better way to put it is aggrandisement.
Nally shows the role that travel writings played in the overall ideological formation at the time where they served to legitimize accumulation by dispossession, as it operated in Ireland. In Marxian theory accumulation and legitimation are often seen to be twin processes operating at the same spatial scales, such as the nation. Nally’s work is suggestive of a differential geography to these processes. Whereas globalized accumulation may result in local dispossession, the ideological dimensions of this have perhaps been less explored. Poverty and inequality must be legitimated to those in power or the privileged in the metropoles. Some current travel writing simply notes that ‘workhouses were little more than concentration camps’ (Daugherty, 2008: 541).
While the Irish peasantry were conceived of as ‘human encumbrances’ whose bodies needed to be disciplined, some now see Africa as a ‘shackled continent’ where the body politic is in need of discipline (Guest, 2004), thereby distracting from the inequities of the global political economy. Nally has written a provocative and compelling book that will be of interest to those in Irish and development studies.