‘Immediate in time and spectacular in space’: Famine,violence and death by proxy

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor author Rob Nixon (2011: xi) opens with Rachel Carson’s depiction of modern agricultural inputs, particularly herbicides and insecticides, as ‘biocides’ – ‘precise weapons’, in Nixon’s view, that target nothing less than ‘life itself’. Nixon finds depth in Carson’s radical account precisely because it captures the non-explosive, non-spectacular nature of ‘slow violence’, a violence of ‘delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, 2011: 2, emphasis added). For Nixon the ongoing ‘chemical and radiological legacies’ of late modern war, the intergenerational violence of climate change, the regular and devastating ‘ecological assaults’ on local habitats, and the disarticulation of traditional livelihoods are all examples of an ‘attritional lethality’ that destroys life by slowly liquidating the conditions for sustaining future human survival.

Although I had not read Nixon’s account by the time Human Encumbrances went to press, my understanding of famine as a form of political violence is strikingly similar to Nixon’s understanding of ‘attritional lethality’. Cronin, Carmody and Kinealy recognize my efforts to reposition the Great Irish Famine as a process not an event (Rangasami, 1985), showing how colonization violently transforms indigenous polities and social structures in ways that undermine rural livelihoods and render particular social groups susceptible to exogenous shocks (Mokyr, 1983). They each draw attention to my remark that ‘disasters do not happen; they are designed’, though Carmody in particular worries that this veers too close to claiming a degree of intentionality that ‘is difficult to prove’. While it might be admitted that the Irish Famine was far from a natural catastrophe, it appears improper to suggest that anyone might be responsible for the tragedy. To cite the prescient remarks of the Catholic Archbishop John Hughes (1847: 22): ‘Who did it? No one did it, and yet it was done’.

The point of my argument was to show that direct causation is only one of many ways to ‘design’ disaster. In certain situations, whole populations might be ‘exposed’ to lethal conditions. In other circumstances, rulers and elites might purposefully dismantle social safety nets, or fail to suppress conduct that promotes mass hunger, making large numbers of deaths far more probable. In still other circumstances, stigmatized social groups might be ‘let die’ in the name of progress and structural reform. Modern famines are thus multi-causal crises – an outcome of ecological triggers, political brokering, and humanitarian politics (Watts, 1991).

These different typologies of causation are frequently ignored, however, because ‘violence’ is still commonly ‘conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility’ (Nixon, 2011: 2). Archbishop Hughes (1847: 5) sought to interrupt this logic by distinguishing the ‘antecedent circumstances’ from the ‘primary’ or ‘original causes’ of famine. John Mitchel, for whom the ‘primary’ cause of famine was the political system that produced and maintained poverty by denying the poor ownership of the land, echoed Hughes’s sentiments, while contemporary scholars such as David Arnold (1988: 29) insist that famines are ‘a symptom rather than a cause of social weakness’. I tried to give these views more space than they have typically received in the voluminous literature on the Great Irish Famine.

For Samatar and Weis the process by which people are transformed into ‘encumbrances to modernization’ resonates strongly with contemporary moments of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003). Samatar compares my account of violence in the Irish countryside to the action of ‘resource pirates’ off the Somali coast, while Weis finds echoes in the ‘aggressive new phase of land-grabbing now unfolding’ in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Both comparisons are interesting and foreground once more the ‘vast structures that give rise to acts of personal violence and constitute forms of violence in and of themselves’ (Nixon, 2011: 10). But when violence is expanded to incorporate systems of capital and regimes of colonial rule is there a danger that intentionality recedes to a vanishing point? Does violence go silent as the plethora of actors and the chain of causation swells?

In the preface to Human Encumbrances I wrote: ‘Behind the structural causes of hunger lie the machinations of politicians, legislators, workhouse guardians, usurious creditors, apathetic landowners, and utopian economist. The challenge is to determine the key sites of agency and action from the ‘sprawl’ of compound forces’. Time and again I tried to show that events presented as ineluctable or unavoidable were in fact the product of powerful ideologies and the predictable outcome of certain policy choices. In particular I highlighted the constraints placed on relief policy by the ‘new science’ of political economy and the insistence on using the Irish Famine as an occasion to engineer a new social order in Ireland. Cronin feels that I may have given more space to the ‘moral critique’ of British political economy, although I did use the writings of William Thornton, Charles le Quesne, Lord Dufferin, William Blacker – not to mention the writings of the Young Irelanders, like Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel, and the heartrending accounts produced by the Quakers – to show that more progressive voices were routinely ‘silenced, marginalized, or wilfully ignored’. My conclusion that ‘the “rights of the poor” and the “rights of property” were not accorded the same value’ is informed by the sense of injustice raised by these observers of Irish conditions. It is also important to recognize that alternative policies were available: the British government could have barred food exports, slaughtered livestock for home consumption, prohibited the distillation of alcohol, and intervened in food markets to depress the rising cost of provisions. Indeed such strategies were the cornerstone of European famine policies prior to the advent of market fundamentalism in the 19th century.

It also the case that many officials saw the failure of the Irish harvest, and the distress among the lower classes, as an occasion to radically restructure the social fabric of Irish society. As early as 1838, George Nicholls, the chief architect of the Irish Poor Law, had argued that the government ought to encourage the Irish to ‘transition’ to a more civilized agrarian economy. As the famine wore on, many found it all too easy to agree with the sentiments of Lord Hill:

The Irish people have profited much by the famine, the lesson was severe; but so rooted were they in their old prejudices and old ways, that no teacher could have induced them to make the changes which this visitation of Divine Providence has brought about, both in their habits of life and in their mode of agriculture. (Hill, 1971 [1887]: 9)

The London Times linked death with renewal through the colonial image of terra nullius: ‘In a few years’, one editorial rejoiced, ‘a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan’ (cited in Whelan, 1995: 32). Such sentiments suggest that Irish Famine was a ‘crime of commission’ as much as a ‘sin of omission’.

It is impossible for me to respond to all the points raised by Kinealy, Cronin, Carmody, Weis and Samatar. I am very grateful for their rich set of criticisms and I am very pleased that my book has provoked such considered debate. I began my response by citing the French philosopher Michel Foucault who provocatively suggests that under certain political systems ‘killing’ does not take the form of murder as such, but includes forms of governmental rule that disperse risk, making disasters more probable for particular populations. This mode of ‘killing’ aptly describes how whole populations can be displaced, pauperized or otherwise ‘gutted of the capacity’ to maintain ‘their once sustaining landscapes’ (Nixon, 2011: 19). The English MP G.P. Scrope (1849: 26) comes closest to what I mean to imply when he charged his own government with a policy of ‘extermination’ – not by direct design, he hastened to add, but ‘by their deprivation of the means of living, of shelter, clothing, and of sufficiency of food’. Famine, we might conclude, is the ultimate form of death by proxy.