Yes, absolutely. But at least for me it was shocking to learn that Ireland, right next door to Britain, was suffering from similar famines to India.
I'd be more shocked to find out that Britain in the 19th century made things better in a region with famine.
There's a historical grey area here. India had experienced the conditions of their famine before, as you might expect, things happen more than once and so they had a social structure agreement between villages where ones who's crops were stricken and lost would have their food stocks supplemented with those of neighboring villages, and every village grew more than they needed to facilitate this. This worked excellently for probably thousands of years, until the Brits arrived and insisted taxes be collected, and they took crop yields in lieu of money the Indians didn't have.
Either they were unaware because they assumed the brown people had no idea what they were doing, or they were aware and didn't give a shit because the people were brown, or some combo of the two, who's to say. But they did the very same to the Irish. Landlords were entitled to the yields of their land, and they took whatever it produced, which exasperated the already dire situation.
If that recollection is correct, then while the english might not have lit the metaphorical fire, they definitely gathered the kindling.
> The problem was not that the land was barren.... But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. ... In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland “rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce.”
A snippet from the snippet you apparently neglected to read.
Yes, that's generally how power works.
Moreso than that, they exacerbated it. The British farmer barons refused to lower their demand on their crops to allow the Irish to consume them in lieu of their lost crops. In addition, they were the ones that pushed heavily for a monoculture on potatoes and a few oats over a diverse agricultural landscape; which allowed the famine to get so widespread.
In other words, the Irish Famine wasn't any worse than most contemporary famines. However, it was a death toll for the Irish because all of the grown food was shipped over the North Channel (or you were imprisoned/killed for refusing to cede it).
There's a reason the (catholic) Irish hated the British so fervently and it was 100% due to liberal involuntary servitude punishments, Cromwellian policies, and the Black 47.
That doesn't mesh with what I've read. The English were generally derisive of the Irish's reliance on potatoes. But the Irish became reliant on potatoes because of the shrinking size of the average tenant farmer's allotment. Potatoes are labor intensive but produce a higher number of calories per area of land than others staple crops, especially on marginal land.
The British demanded specific oats and other crops, which required large allotments; this left the Irish farmers with a small portion of land to grow their own subsistence on, in turn leading to Potatoes as the only option (ending in a monoculture). When the potatoes started dying, the Irish had no access to the other crops (as they were grown for the tenant holders).
Where does this come from?
The article we are discussing mentions various bits of helping, as does the wikipedia page.
It looks like a complex mix of various entities doing different things they think would help, some effective, some not.
As a matter of law, the Irish were not allowed to own land. They could only rent a limited amount from landowners -- 0.5 acres at most, if my memory serves. And the only culture with a sufficient yield per unit of surface that the Irish could both make rent and feed themselves was the potato.
The rest of the land served to produce other crops for the benefit of British landowners. As a result, the island of Ireland was in fact producing enough food to feed its population through the Famine. It was just exported to Britain instead.
The Irish were not "white" back then
The Irish were coerced into the UK and were officially British citizens, that is ostensibly, co-nationals. They weren't treated as such because those in power regarded them as subhuman. If that isn't racism the word is devoid of meaning.
> I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
In 1835, it's quite progressive to posit that you can, through education, create a class of Indians who are "English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Arguably, it was too optimistically progressive--history showed that Oxbridge educations could go only so far in turning Indians into English.