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Wednesday 23 April 2014 16.30 - 18.30
ZD-4 SOC20 Famine and Poor Relief on the European Periphery: Ireland and Finland Compared
Prominentenzimmer
Network: Social Inequality Chair: David Mitch
Organizers: - Discussant: David Green
Declan Curran, Mary Kelly : Core-Periphery Dynamics and the Great Irish Famine
This paper explores the complex nature of Ireland’s economic and political relationship with Britain in the decades prior to the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1852. Specifically, we focus on two aspects of British and Irish relations: (i) the changing nature of Irish economic development in the late 18th and early 19th ... (Show more)
This paper explores the complex nature of Ireland’s economic and political relationship with Britain in the decades prior to the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1852. Specifically, we focus on two aspects of British and Irish relations: (i) the changing nature of Irish economic development in the late 18th and early 19th century; and (ii) the origins and implementation of the Irish Poor Law (1838). Both of these developments reveal Ireland’s position vis-à-vis Britain to be a nuanced, evolving “core-periphery” process rather than a simple, static “core-periphery” dichotomy. Moreover, these developments had far-reaching consequences for how the famine unfolded in 1845 – both in determining the contours of Irish economic landscape on the eve of the famine and in carving out social and regional vulnerabilities which were exacerbated by the famine.
In terms of Irish economic development in the decades prior to the famine, it is noteworthy how minor an influence was exerted by the union between the Irish and British parliaments. While the Act of Union saw the Irish legislature being effectively subsumed into the British parliament, it was a confluence of factors prior to the union that brought about Irish economic peripherality. The emergence of Britain as an industrial powerhouse impacted heavily, yet distinctly, on individual Irish industries. Industries such as the linen industry enjoyed some benefits of proximity to Britain, while others such as the cotton industry fell into decline. As well as British industrialisation, the changing colonial system and the economic disruption of the Napoleonic wars exerted an influence on international trade relations and agricultural prices, influencing shifts in Irish agricultural output from pasture to tillage and impacting on land usage and landlord-tenant relations. Increased economic volatility and restrictions on trade made Irish economic development in the eighteenth century a tale of ever-closer links with the British economy. Irish industries experienced distinct “core-periphery” relationships, and these evolving pre-famine economic developments were not a direct consequence of political union.
Beyond the economic sphere, the increasingly centralised political structure did exert an influence on how the Irish famine unfolded. One salient example of this is provided by the development of the Irish Poor Law. Despite growing recognition of the deteriorating conditions facing the Irish poor, it was only in the 1830s that efforts were made to implement comprehensive statute law to address the issue of Irish poverty relief. However, the British Government chose to ignore the advice offered to them by the Irish Poor Law Commission on how best to structure a Poor Law suited to Irish conditions. The Irish Poor Law passed in 1838 replicated the system in existence in Britain, based on a poverty-deterrent work house system, and was to be financed by the levying of a poor rate to be paid half by landlords and half by tenants. However, the failure to design of the system with local conditions in mind may well have greatly hampered relief efforts during the famine. As the famine unfolded, those areas characterised by concentrated poverty did not have the resources to support adequate relief. Moreover, in areas characterised by high numbers of people living on small landholdings, the burden of the poor rate was borne by the landowners. Many landowners, consequently, sought to ‘disencumber’ their estates by evicting tenants occupying holding sizes for which they had to pay taxes, thereby turning the rural poor into absolute paupers. From the outset therefore, the implementation of a poor law insensitive to local conditions was not only undermined by regional poverty but it in fact exacerbated it. In this instance, the “core periphery” relationship resulted in the transposing of inappropriate institutions from one jurisdiction to another, suggesting that the disadvantages of peripherality manifest themselves differently in an institutional context as distinct from an economic context. (Show less)

Peter Gray : ‘The Great British Famine of 1845-50’? Ireland, the UK and Peripherality in Famine Relief and Philanthropy.
The political context of the Irish Famine of 1845-50 was established by Ireland’s political incorporation into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, and the failure of the UK state to prevent mass mortality during the 1840s consequently attributed by Irish nationalists at the time and after ... (Show more)
The political context of the Irish Famine of 1845-50 was established by Ireland’s political incorporation into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, and the failure of the UK state to prevent mass mortality during the 1840s consequently attributed by Irish nationalists at the time and after as evidence of the failure of that union and the necessity of Irish independence from Britain. This paper seeks to move away from nationalist and unionist polemics to consider the shifting dynamics of the moral and political peripherality of Ireland within the UK state and society in the 1840s and the relationship between this and both state famine relief measures and private philanthropy. It will argue that despite Ireland’s geographical isolation from Great Britain, the political and cultural construction of Ireland as peripheral to the UK fluctuated significantly during the famine years, and that Irish elites adopted strategies that at different times served to emphasise the country’s commonality of ‘Britishness’ or to highlight its difference from ‘British’ experience and norms. These fluctuations in moral, emotional and political engagement with the Irish crisis in Britain led to significantly different public policy and private philanthropic outcomes at different stages of the famine – varying from large-scale charitable donations and a highly interventionist food ration relief policy in Spring-Summer 1847, to a radical alienation of political and public sympathy from Ireland, associated with the virtual withdrawal of public and private resource transfers to Ireland in 1848-49. The paper will also consider the highly controversial imposition of a double-peripheralisation relief model on Ireland in 1849, in the shape of a ‘rate in aid’ system that threw all additional relief expenditure on to Irish resources (through the poor law), while taxing the recovering east and north of the country to relieve the continuing hunger crisis in the peripheral Irish west and south-west. The contributions to debate of some key commentators on the question of Ireland’s relationship with the UK, including Charles Trevelyan, Thomas Chalmers, Daniel O’Connell, Sharman Crawford and Isaac Butt will be reviewed. The paper will conclude with a brief review of how the dynamics of political and moral peripheralisation in the British-Irish famine context compared to the response to crisis in other divided European societies in the 1840s (principally in Belgium, the Netherlands and the German states), and invite comparison with the case of Finland and its relationship with the Russian Empire and Scandinavia (as well as with British public opinion) in the 1860s. (Show less)

Andrew Newby : Statebuilding, Peripherality and Famine Relief in Finland, 1867-8
The so-called ‘Hunger Years’ of 1867-68, during which 100,000 people perished, occurred at a critical juncture in the development of Finland’s national identity. This was a time when the Finns’ constitutional links to Russia were vigorously contested, intellectually if not militarily. The relationship between Finland, Russia and the Russian imperial ... (Show more)
The so-called ‘Hunger Years’ of 1867-68, during which 100,000 people perished, occurred at a critical juncture in the development of Finland’s national identity. This was a time when the Finns’ constitutional links to Russia were vigorously contested, intellectually if not militarily. The relationship between Finland, Russia and the Russian imperial system in the 1860s did not conform to a simple, bipolar ‘core-periphery’ model, but had been subject to considerable shifts over time and space. In a recent overview of the Great Irish Famine, W.J. Smyth argued that ‘the proper geographical and political unit for the analysis of the Great Famine is Britain and Ireland’. Moreover, in stressing the imperial-colonial relationship between Great Britain and Ireland, Smyth stressed that ‘an outstanding feature’ of the famine period ‘was the exercise of centralised political and administrative control over Ireland and the Irish people, which increased after the passing of the union.’ Like Ireland, Finland could be constructed as a periphery in various ways during the nineteenth century. As a European periphery, for example, and especially in dealing with the modernisation of the economy, Finland falls into Berend and Ranki’s definition of ‘eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean (excluding France)’. In a Russian imperial context, however, while Finland did form the northwestern border of the empire, the notion of core-periphery must be interpreted very differently from the Anglo-Irish relationship.
This paper will therefore situate responses to the Finnish crisis of 1867-8 not only in the context of core-periphery relations between Russia and Finland, but also within Finland itself. It will start with an analysis of the changing nature of the mental geography of Finland, both externally and internally, as it shifted from the Swedish to the Russian realm. It will then analyse the way in which a coherent, autonomous, Finnish state – with its own internal core-periphery dynamic – was imagined by the administration in Helsinki, and how this informed relief policy and the distribution of charity. Finally, the paper will explore the impact of the crisis, especially the relationship between memory and political rhetoric, in the subsequent growth in the Finnish state’s role in the welfare of its citizens. (Show less)



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