Mackenzie Perkins
Irish Potato Blight (Famine)
The Irish potato blight, or the great famine, was a period of emigration, disease and mass starvation in Ireland. The cause of the famine was a fungus called potato blight, which destroyed potato crops. One third of the population in Ireland was dependent on the potato for many reasons, but one of the largest reasons was absentee land ownership. The Irish were a simple, agricultural society, but the British Empire, colonialism, was a direct lead to industrialization. The British conquered the Irish, brought over the potatoes, and caused the Irish to become monoculture. The English had absentee landownership, meaning they owned the land in Ireland but resided in England. The English subdivided their land in order to have more renters. More renters meant more money and protection incase the family who owned a piece of the land past away. The Irish families were only given about an acre of land to plant crops on, which was not enough to be able to produce a sufficient amount of wheat to both feed the family and pay the landowner. Since their options for planting crops was low, they planted potatoes because they grow more abundantly than other crop options.
A way to have prevented this famine would be to have more crop options, but there is nothing that could have been done to prevent this, the culture at this time would not have allowed it. It seems obvious in today’s western society that we shouldn’t make people starve like that, they have civil rights and should be treated properly. The enlightenment that western cultures have now though, did not exist back then in the 1800s, they did not care about other people starving nor did they consider ‘civil rights’.