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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your conclusion, but this story is very badly sourced and really should not be used [0]. We only have two sources from the 1800s that claim it: one is contemporary but provides no attribution and we have no reason to believe they had firsthand knowledge. The other is 40 years later and is attributed to a conversation with the son of the sultan's personal physician. Yeah.

With such bad evidence for such an incendiary claim, I think we're better off sticking with the enormous amount of other evidence that policy caused the famine and letting this particular story die.

(What is true and backed up by evidence is that the sultan sent £1k. The rest has no reliable source.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...

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Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers. By Christine Kinealy

https://books.google.co.id/books?id=GnksAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PR4&hl=...

> He had originally offered £10,000 to the British Relief Association and some ships laden with provisions, but had been advised by British diplomats that British Royal protocol meant that nobody should contribute more than the Queen. It was suggested that he gave half the sum contributed by Victoria.

That was published in 2013. Do you have a physical copy that would allow you to see footnote 64 and see where this author got the story?

(The Google book has a lot of footnote 64s at the bottom, but it's impossible to see which corresponds to which chapter or to know if the 64 we're looking for is even there at all.)

Chapter 5-64: The Albion. A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, 21 July 1849.

The Ottoman Sultan's donation (or the US$170/£111 famously donated by a group of Native American Choctaw Nation, which is verified historical fact [0][1][2], or the £14,000 donated by Calcutta in 1846 [0], which is > Queen Victoria's subsequent 1848 donation) have nothing to do with arguing that British policy caused the famine.

They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed that their own charitable donations to a famine that killed 1 in 8 Irish people, were not that much and could be rivaled or outdonated (Calcutta) by private groups, even groups like the Choctaw who had just survived the Trail of Tears forced displacement/genocide 16 years before. (This is commemorated today by sculptures in Midleton, County Cork, Ireland "Kindred Spirits" and a companion sculpture in Tuskahoma, OK "Choctaw Ireland Monument"). By implication the Crown wasn't at all exercised about changing the setup in Ireland where most of the population were tenant farmers on the 90% of the land was foreign-owned. The landlords made a lot of money on exporting grain (esp. during the Napoleonic Wars until the price crashed). The tenants had essentially zero political representation in Westminster.

Nearly two centuries later, Ireland's population (all-island, Republic + NI) has still not recovered to the pre-Famine peak (1841, 8.175m est.) [3]. Predicted to finally happen sometime in the 2050s.

Curious if anyone has documented the massive imbalance in ownership in land in pre-Famine Ireland and compared it to other historical situations (Russia, colonial Americas, Africa, India, 1930s Ukraine) and their eventual outcomes.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw_Nation_of_Oklahoma#For...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40304645

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_population_of_Irela...

> They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed

Again, to be clear, this anecdote is not verified. It is extremely poorly sourced, not much more than an urban legend. The only attribution for the story dating to the 19th century is a claim that someone heard it from the sultan's physician's son, and that claim is put forward more than 40 years after the events.

The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is the claim that I'm responding to. I'm not questioning that others did send donations or that some of those donations exceeded those put forward by the British government.

All of that is true, but it being true does not justify perpetuating unsubstantiated stories that happen to support the same conclusion. As you have amply demonstrated, there's enough good evidence in favor of the conclusion that we don't need to rely on bad evidence.

> > They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed

"They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.

> The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is to claim that I'm responding to.

But it's also claimed the Sultan's ships had to sail secretly, and north of Dublin to Drogheda, instead of simply unloading in Dublin, which would be faster and infinitely more logical (because the famine areas were in the west/southwest/south, not the northeast). So no, that would be a second piece of corroboration that he had needed to make the donation secretly (Why? Unless he had a fetish for being the Bruce Wayne of the 1840s. It makes no sense unless there was a reason.)

If I ever get a time machine I guess I'm dialing it to Sultan Abdülmecid's and Queen Victoria's residences in 1847 to plant listening devices to settle this for once and all. :)

But either way, even if the Ottomans never existed, the British Crown response was embarrassing, everything else is a sidebar. This all feels like it needs an AI treatment starring Joan Sims as Queen Victoria in one of the British "Carry On" comedies, and Syd James as the Sultan, and Paul Whitehouse ("Ralph and Ted") as token Irish tenant farmer. "Carry On Famine Relief".

> "They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.

Oh, I was interpreting your comment as relevant to mine rather than completely tangential. My mistake, as you were.

My comment is directly responsive to yours (and you now have triplicate threads where you're repeatedly challenging why): under all circumstances the Crown's response was inadequate, and disputing the anecdote about the Crown allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching that exact conclusion.

Further I showed you an independent piece of corroboration about whether the Sultan had to donate in secret, so it's absolutely not single-sourced to "one anecdote forty lears later by the Sultan's son."

Here's more corroboration by Drogheda people (and former President McAleese) that the Ottoman famine relief ships did in fact land in Drogheda (and inexplicably, not Dublin): https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-c... Since there is zero reason to waste time sailing urgently-needed food aid ships north past Dublin to a smaller port (Drogheda) from which it would take longer to distribute, that raises the obvious question why they did that. Go look at any map of Ireland to verify that, instead of mocking that.

As they say, you can not make a blind man see

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