Irish Potato Famine #1 - Let's Talk History

welcome back everyone to the beginning of a new reaction series we are going back to our friends at extra history uh for something else a little different i've had a lot of requests to tackle the topic of what we know as the irish potato famine so over the next five days we're going to be doing just that there may be a break on sunday as we uh have episode two of my series from france coming out if you have not seen my very first episode from the battlefield of the psalm about the pals battalions there'll be a link at the end that'll pop up on your screen definitely check that out i'm very proud of how that came out and it seems to be doing very well compared to my typical original content so i'm excited about that so check it out uh with that in mind we're going to go ahead and dive right into part one of what is a five-part series i don't know a ton about the irish potato famine i know that it was something that was not just confined to ireland this potato blight this disease that affected the crops hit all of europe and i know that ireland's population has still not recovered from that there are still today fewer people in ireland than there were before this irish potato famine started between death and emigration it had a devastating effect on the island on the island that it has not yet recovered from so i'm excited to learn more a lot of people here in america have roots that go back to the irish potato famine a lot of strong irish roots in america and a lot of that goes back to immigration that took place in the aftermath of this event so let's go ahead and dive in the first thing the farmer notices is the smell an earthy rot in the fields the irishman walks into his potato field to find the plants turning brown and wilting he digs up a tuber and finds it slimy like a bar of soap when he slices it open brown mucus oozes out the whole crop is the same it'll be a hungry year but he will survive because this isn't ireland in the famine year of 1845 it's the united states two years earlier and this man has no idea how this blight will devastate the country of his birth [Music] the irish potato famine ranks as one of europe's worst agricultural disasters an event so momentous that it not only defined a generation it scattered a people to the winds when the blight arrived in 1845 ireland had a population of 8.2 million within a decade though a third of it was gone and i think in around the time of world war ii that population had dropped to something like 4 million and i think it's only 6 million now so that shows you just the impact that this had around 1.1 million died from starvation and disease while 2 million immigrated abroad actually you know what strike that immigration isn't the right word it was flight plain and simple well and it wouldn't be the right word anyway it would be immigration so emigration is when you're talking about people leaving a place immigration is when they come to a new place so the people who emigrated from ireland didn't all go to the united states they went to other places too the people so when you emigrate from ireland you immigrate to the new country so important to make that distinction an evacuation during the height of the famine years when children's mouths were stained green from eating grass and dogs scavenged graveyards people brawled on the docks for space aboard the overcrowded vessels most didn't even care where the ship was headed as long as it wasn't ireland so i i talk a lot about this in other videos the idea of what are known as subsistence farmers this is a time in in history when the majority of the world's population work as subsistence farmers which basically means you farm your own land or you farm land that other people own and then you live off of what you farm you might trade some of those crops for other needs that you have but by and large you're living off of what you farm yourself and so if your farm fails you don't eat it's really that simple it's not like okay i just have to i continue to make my income because of the job that i have and i'll just buy other food no that was your income that was your life and now it's gone yet ireland was not the only country or even the first to experience the blight the fungus responsible emerged in the united states in 1843. isn't it interesting how how often some of the stuff that we associate with one country first impacted the united states uh spanish flu we call it spanish flu but the first real known outbreak of it happens in the united states in kansas it probably didn't originate in the u.s but yep hitching a ride to europe in cargo holds farmers attempting to strengthen european potato strains may have even accidentally imported it when they crossbred their potatoes with american stock and strengthened by a rainy summer and carried by the wind the fungus stormed the continent during the summer of 1845 news of the blight filled european newspapers belgium had lost 87 percent of its potato crop flanders 92 holland lost 70 germany and france got off relatively light only losing a fifth of their harvest rumors of starvation leaked out of russia and poland while english farmers saw similar devastation so we don't know sometimes what those numbers are in some of those countries governments prepared for a season of hunger and instability the potato after all was the staple diet of europe's emerging industrial working class this miracle plant imported from peru could produce two to four times more calories per acre than grain cheap and easy to prepare it allowed europe's shrinking agricultural sector to feed its booming manufacturing workforce there it also at this by this time in history the early 19th century there have been some significant developments in agricultural technology that and one of the guys who was responsible for this was a guy named jethro tall for whom the band was named that allowed farming to be much more cost efficient much more time efficient labor efficient you could plant things quicker you could harvest them quicker and it made a big difference but yeah this is really just comes down to simple economics when you're a poor farmer and you've got a crop that can provide significantly more calories per acre that's what you're going to plant and between 1750 and 1850 the european population nearly doubled partially due to the potato any threat to the potato crop was a serious problem in fact these crop failures would help spur the wave of revolutions that wracked europe in 1848 but here the story of ireland diverges because while all these countries experienced economic hardship and social change ireland alone starved the reasons for that are complicated but they boiled down to two factors the first was a land system that made ireland uniquely vulnerable to a crop failure and the second factor was human a group of british leaders governing from london who saw the famine relief as a vehicle for reforming the irish economy and instructing the people's moral character throughout the crisis british policymakers would make economic reform their primary objective yeah and this it became a religious thing too because you have a britain who is primarily protestant you have an ireland who's mostly catholic and there are a lot of stories along the way of villages where people were starving and you had and i say this as a protestant christian myself um you had protestant christians coming to town offering relief offering help and assistance to these starving catholic people but only if they would convert first uh and it's it's sad and tragic and and frustrating and angering but this was all a big part of it and that's like he said why ireland got impacted by this in ways that other countries didn't belgium they showed show lost 87 percent of their crop they weren't as dependent on it and they weren't as vulnerable because of it with saving lives as a distant secondary goal the blight indeed was as british politicians argued an act of god unstoppable and inevitable the famine by contrast was the work of men but that was still to come in the summer of 1845 british prime minister sir robert peel was tracking reports of blight he worried about it striking england of course but he knew that if it took hold in ireland the result would be catastrophic technically ireland had been a part of the united kingdom of great britain and ireland since 1801 but in a practical sense it had been the very first step in the british colonial empire so ireland had been the focus of british conquest ambitions for many centuries uh and you go all the way back to uh even before the wars of the roses and you've got focuses on taking ireland even scotland thought about taking ireland when it was a separate country robert the bruce sent his brother to try and conquer ireland at one point and that was you know 800 years ago so this has been an ongoing thing uh it was just the natural next step once britain had all been united under one government in the early 1700s the next step was to make a united kingdom with ireland today we know it as the united kingdom of great britain which is great britain is this whole island that has scotland wales and england on it and northern ireland because protestant northern ireland is part of the uk while the republic of ireland is the rest of the island and i think it's been independent for about 100 years now the english had ruled it directly or indirectly for centuries in that time the british crown had gradually dispossessed native irish catholic families confiscating their land and gifting it to english and scots protestants who were considered more reliably loyal so they they call these ulster plantations it's northern ireland it's the part that's uh um the protestant today and uh very often here in the u.s and i don't know how prevalent this is in uh the uk this term in the us we have the term scots irish and a lot of people say that their their roots are scots irish especially if you're from the south north carolina um virginia tennessee eastern kentucky a lot of these areas have strong scots irish roots and these are people who came from ireland but they were part of that like scottish northern ireland where a lot of those scottish folks had come over and taken over those plantations in northern ireland and then came to the united states while catholic countries sponsored a series of irish revolts against the protestant english and tensions grew the climax came when oliver cromwell re-conquered ireland after a rebellion completing the process of land confiscation and totally replacing irish landowners with english and scots so oliver cromwell is the lord protector he is the one who is uh responsible for overthrowing king charles the first who was then beheaded and then cromwell becomes a king in all but name and you can see that he goes and conquers ireland so uh really not a lot of change there the so-called anglo-irish and it was bloody conservative estimates suggest that cromwell's invasion along with the famine it caused may have killed 10 percent of the irish population to prevent another uprising cromwell and later british governments passed a series of penal laws restricting catholic rights catholics could not hold public office own firearms or be admitted to the bar as lawyers they couldn't own a horse worth over five pounds vote teach school or marry a protestant and lest you think this only applied to irish people there's a lot of similar rules in england that existed even until the most recent times the reason that you end up with a german george the first on the throne of the united kingdom is because uh well it would have been great britain then not united kingdom um is because he was the next protestant in line for the throne even though there were like dozens of catholics who could have taken the throne they were ineligible because they were catholic there were restrictions on how they could own land and when willing land to children they couldn't give it intact to the eldest and had to break it up equally among all their children churches couldn't be built of stone and had to sit far from roads and they couldn't attend universities at home or abroad so you can see how there is an inherent discrimination against catholics in a majority catholic place like ireland uh that all kind of lays the groundwork for what's going to happen with this potato famine and 80 of the irish population was catholic these laws were designed to bar irish catholics from all forms of political and economic advancement and while they were gradually repealed the last vanishing in 1829 it would take generations for the irish to recover economically and on top of that these landlords charged astronomical rent on the land barely allowing the native irish farmers to survive and the whole thing took place in a system of middlemen so convoluted that okay okay here's an analogy imagine someone owns an apartment building today that's the landowner they don't want to manage it so they pass it off to a middle person to manage now the middle person wants to make a profit and knows there's a lot of demand so they jack up the rent and to make more profits they subdivide some of the larger apartments into smaller ones now under the pressure of making this exorbitant rent some of the buildings tenants start to get roommates or rent some of their bedrooms on airbnb further subdividing their own apartment wow this sounds really familiar oh hi nyc i didn't see you in this analogy anyway that's basically what happened to irish farmers in fact some of the landowners known as absentee landlords hadn't even lived in ireland for generations the trend was bad then events made it worse in the united states one of the things that appealed to so many people and coming from europe to america was the availability of land there was a whole lot of land and there weren't a lot of people on it you know it was very limited the people who could or ever had the chance to become land owners in places like britain so very few people actually owned land most people were living on land that was owned by someone else so you had a really strong class divide going on there and that's one of the things that appealed to people and coming to america was a chance to do and achieve something as simple as being a landowner that you could never do in your existing country during the napoleonic wars irish goods suddenly became a major part of british imports as the war cut off suppliers in france things improved for the irish with many turning to new manufacturing jobs but then napoleon was defeated french goods returned and the burgeoning industrial sector collapsed out of work weavers and tradesmen flooded the countryside engaging in ludicrous bidding wars for small plots of farmland promising to pay rents the land could never sustain irish farmers began cultivating land that had never been farmed before rocky hillsides beaches and bogs the land subdivided already through the inheritance laws and the greed of landowners got subdivided further and middlemen for those landlords increasingly disappointed with returns from potato farmers evicted whole villages to use the land for cattle raising which squeezed the farmers even further by 1841 45 of all agricultural holdings were under five acres so you can start to see how there are just a number of events it's a perfect storm of things happening for decades sometimes centuries that build up to this something like the potato famine does not happen in a vacuum it doesn't just kind of happen you know there's so much that has to happen to create the situation where a disaster of this magnitude can unfold and you're starting to see a little bit of that background one of the things i love about extra history is they're very good about giving that background and telling the story in such a way that you can see how point a leads to point b leads to point c leads to here's the story of what we're talking about a consequence of population explosion paired with a land system that depended on chains of landlords often three or four deep leading back to england only one thing allowed people to survive you guessed it the potato a single acre of potato plants could produce six tons of crop per year enough to feed a family of six no other crop provided such a yield but many irish families were larger than that and the rent still had to be paid in the decades leading up to the famine the shrinking plots of land gave most no more than a subsistence living ireland was already the poorest country in europe before the subdivision most families at least had a cow but in the decades before the famine the more expensive cow disappeared replaced by a pig milk butter eggs and herring disappeared from the peasants diets cash crops like barley and oats vanished replaced by more potatoes visitors were shocked at the depth of irish poverty the majority of the country went shoeless and many in the countryside wore literal rags in towns landless workers lived by the pawn shop pawning their sunday clothes after attending church buying them back on friday payday wearing them to church again and then repeating the cycle i mean the this was a disaster waiting to happen and when you're living just on the edge of extinction as it is and then this blight hits you can see how easily things went the way they did but those same visitors were often astounded by the peasants hardiness irish peasants were strong and often good looking scientific testing so popular in the victorian age found that the average irish peasant was both taller and stronger than both english and belgian ones and it was due to their diet eating nutritious vitamin-filled potatoes three meals a day but in august of 1845 irish farmers walked into their fields and smelled rot the blight was in ireland but london had a plan to use this crisis to remake ireland a plan that would bring down prime minister peel okay so we're just getting started we'll uh we'll dive into this a little deeper tomorrow as always i invite you to share something in the comment section that maybe you learned in this episode you didn't know before or share something with us that you could add to this conversation so we can all learn together and as always the links in the description to the original content and at the end in just a minute you're going to see popped up a link to the video i made about the pals battalions from france at the somme battlefield please check that out let me know what you think we'll see you tomorrow thanks for watching you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 58,543

Keywords: extra credits, irish potato famine, irish history, world history, potato blight, extra history, extra credits history, learn history, ireland history, irish history reaction, isle of blight, irish potato famine documentary, irish potato famine extra history, extra history reaction, historian reaction, historian reacts

Id: QcrUhfZyCds

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 10 2022