Fred A. Wilcox - Shamrocks and Oil Slicks: A People's Uprising Against Shell Oil in County Mayo, Ireland

This charming account of a campaign of local people to stop Shell building a refinery and gas pipeline through the glorious coastal landscape of County Mayo in Ireland is both a rage of anger at a world were profit is put before people and planet; and a celebration of the ordinary people who stand up and protest against this.

In the early 2000s Shell decided to exploit the Corrib Gas Field. Suddenly, local people found workmen and surveyors on their land and in their communities. They made extravagant promises about how Shell's plans would create jobs and bring investment to local communities. They dismissed concerns about the safety of the extremely high pressure gas pipelines that would be laid metres from homes and communities.

Many people welcomed the opportunity to raise some cash. Those who weren't willing to give up their land, or stop fishing the waters that they'd worked for decades, soon found that a shady coalition of politicians, priests, company representatives and the state would organise against them. In some cases this meant even wilder promises. In other cases it meant intimidation, like the couple who found Shell had set up cameras and searchlights pointing at their family home, while men in masks watched through binoculars.

The local campaign grew though, as serious concerns were raised about proposals, and fuelled in part by the violent tactics of the Irish police. Famously five protesters, the Rossport Five, went to jail for 94 days in 2005 for their refusal to abide by a court injunction to stop them protesting. The jailing made the local campaign national news.

Fred A. Wilcox's book is a moving study of the campaign. An American who left the US in disgust following the Vietnam War, he is surprised to find that Ireland too had problems of democracy, accountability and the role of multinational corporations. When socialists discuss social movements we often point out the way that the struggle itself transforms people. When engaged in any campaign, strike, protest movement or struggle people change as they learn new things about the world, their friends and neighbours, the state and the government.

Wilcox's book demonstrates exactly how this happens. In particular many participants are shocked by the violence of the police, and the shady security forces that threaten the activists. One fisherman interviewed has his boat attacked by armed, masked men. Others are badly beaten. Many other activists, who had seen local policemen as friends and neighbours are shocked by the violence used against their peaceful protests. There are obvious similarities with even more brutal events in Nigeria when critics of Shell's pipelines, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were killed in 1995.

Anyone who has been involved in any sort of campaign will recognise what takes place. I was, however, struck by more contemporary parallels - particularly with the movement against fracking where fossil fuel companies often make extravagant promises to local communities, which rarely materialise. The campaigns too are similar.

I don't quite agree with Wilcox's framework for explaining the behaviour of the police. He, rightly, points out that seemingly ordinary men can do awful things to their fellow human beings. But I don't think that the use of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment or Stanley Milgram's electric shock experiments are particularly useful here. The Stanford Experiment has been heavily discredited, including in this excellent piece, and I don't think should form the basis of any left analysis of the role of the police (or other forces of the state). Instead it's better to understand the police as being far from ordinary. They can commit violence on behalf of the state precisely because they've been turned into a force for doing this. The vicious violence of the Nazi Holocaust and US soldier's in Vietnam (two other examples used by Wilcox) arises, not from ordinary people, but from people who have taught (through the dehumanising reality of radicalised war) to see others as sub-human.

This criticism aside, the experience of the campaigners who quickly learn how the capitalist system protects and supports the behaviour of the fossil fuel capitalism, is brilliantly told by Wilcox. Socialists also often point out that it is in the struggle that people learn that revolution is both possible and necessary - and its encouraging to see that some of the activists make that connection.

Sadly Shell wasn't stopped by these campaigners. But Shell didn't win either, selling the plant off a few years later. Ever wary about upsetting shareholders and concerned of their image, the local campaign in County Mayo made Shell's continued presence untenable. There's a lot to learn from these men and women, and thanks to Fred Wilcox for telling their story.

James S. Donnelly, Jr - Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-1824

When I wrote 'Kill All the Gentlemen' I felt obliged to apologise in the introduction for my neglect of the similar radical history of rural Wales and Scotland - that was out of necessity for the book would simply have been too long. I also failed to discuss Ireland in any detail. There the parallels with English rural history are not as simple, but nonetheless, as this important account shows there are similarities but also major differences.

Donnelly is discussing a relatively narrow period of agrarian rebellion, barely three years, but to understand it he has to locate it in the context of Ireland's wider rural history and in particular it's nature as a British colony. This fundamentally shaped the country's agriculture. British landlords (usually absentee) delegated the collection of rents and management of estates to a lower grouping of middlemen. They also were ruthless at using their legal powers to evict and punish those who failed to pay rents (in cash or kind). In addition the country operated with a dated system of tithes that heavily punished all levels of the agricultural population and, finally, the Westminster government used sectarian politics to keep down the majority Catholic population. Life, even when yields were high and prices good, was one of appalling poverty for the mass of the population.

Economic crisis in the 1820s triggered the Rockite rebellion. But the rebellion itself, argues Donnelly, was shaped by a number of other factors that have been neglected by other historians. It isn't enough to simply locate the uprisings in the context of economics, they have to be understood through the prism of sectarian politics and the influence of millennialism. These millennial ideas

assisted in integrating within the same movement Catholics whose material interests frequently clashed, namely landless labourers and cottiers on the one had and the larger farmers on the other. Acceptance of the prophesied ruin of Protestantism was concentrated among the lowest strata of Catholic rural society, but many middling and some substantial farmers also gave credence to this millennial vision.

At times Donnelly emphasises that the Rockite movement was, to some extent, a cross-class alliance. But much of the book shows that this was a mass movement of the poorest. Time and again, the most radical, the most active and the most punished of those who rebelled came from the lowest orders. And while sectarianism played a major part in the struggle, there were some incidents when Catholic landowners were targeted by the rebels. Again, this should not surprise us. The millennial ideas that spread like wildfire through the rural population originated with the writings of Signor Pastorini (a pseudonym for Charles Walmesley) but they fit with a situation in which Protestantism could legitimately be seen as the religion of the ruling and oppressive class. Indeed, when the British sent troops to put down the rebels, they were

commonly cavalry units drawn from England and Scotland; they marched to Protestant churches in the south and southwest, helping to fill edifices long mostly bereft of parishioners and reminding the Rockites that the troops had come to serve the interests of a Protestant church and state bent on the oppression (economic, political, and religious) of Irish Catholics.

Millennial ideas could co-exist with everyday demands. Donnelly quotes one prisoner's testimony that "talked of Pastorini and said that next year would be a year of war. He talked of many other things and said that the price of labour was too low."

The troops were needed because the Rockite rebellion was a mass movement of extreme violence. Incendiarism, assault, murder and robbery were all weapons used by the rebels against their enemies. Particularly at the start of the outbreak the rebels led assaults of homes and sometimes police stations to capture weapons. Short of ammunition they would attack churches for the lead on the roof as material for bullets. Often these attacks were mass affairs involving hundreds of attackers. While the movement used terrorism, it was not a minority affair.

Much of Donnelly's book explores the various tactics of the Rockites. Many of these have parallels with agrarian disturbances in England - the posting of warning notices, the pseudonym of Captain Rock disguising the real names, the firing of buildings and assaults on individuals. There are even, though Donnelly doesn't make the connection himself, examples of what EP Thompson called the Moral Economy. But the truth was that these events were far more violent than comparable events in England. I do not recall one mention of rural rebels in England destroying a Church for instance. Donnelly points out though that this was less about sectarianism and more about "more immediate grievances and mundane objectives" such as lead from the roofs. Incendiarism took place on an enormous scale, over a prolonged period, and the murder (and occasional rape) of enemies was also unprecedented.

Authorities were unable to do much about rebellion on this scale. The repression was brutal and extremely violent, though it failed to restrain the rebels, about 600 people were transported and 100 executed. Indeed, the rebellion itself was very successful. Rents and rent arrears were frequently reduced or annulled, evictions were reversed and so confident were the rebels that they would intimidate those who had taken up tenancies of evicted families, even up to seven years previously. Many hated landlords, their officers or their families were killed, injured or driven from the local area. Donnelly argues that longer term "Captain Rock" scared the landowners enough that they were wary of ever using mass evictions again.

This is an excellent account. It locates a few years of radical agrarian rebellion in the wider economic, political and colonial context. While there are parallels with events in England, Scotland and Wales, particularly in the practise of the Rockites, the context is quite different. These struggles did not end rural Irish poverty - but it was alleviated it somewhat though with an economic upturn the movement was to disappear. What Captain Rock shows most though, is that no matter how oppressed, downtrodden or poor people are, there is always the potential for mass rebellion, and the violence of that rebellion is proportional to the violence of the exploitation and oppression.

Related ReviewsKee - The Bold Fenian Men
Kee - The Most Distressful Country
Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger

Robert Kee - The Bold Fenian Men

When I travelled to the north of Ireland last year I enjoyed reading volume one of Robert Kee's history of Irish Nationalism The Most Distressful Country. In my review I remarked that I looked forward to reading the second volume and a follow up trip to the Antrim coast this year provided the excuse to read that. Unfortunately, while there is much of interest in The Bold Fenian Men it failed to give me the same satisfaction as the first volume.

The period covered by volume two, roughly 1850 to the Easter Rising of 1916, and I think that in part this is the source of the problem. Kee notes with irony, that for most of the period the landowners and businessmen that exploited the majority of the Irish population were themselves Irish. In fact, Kee emphasises that the development of capitalism in Ireland was very much an Irish affair. Britain was the colonial power, that sucked the wealth and population from the country, but capitalism in Ireland was run by Irish capitalists and landowners. Thus the growth of popular Irish nationalism is caught in a trap - on the one hand the mass of the population at various times demanded Irish independence, but also the Irish ruling class also wanted, at various times, their own version of independence or home rule. Kee seems unable to distinguish between the two class interests and thus, his book at times seems confused and inadequate.

At times Kee does comment on the contradictions caused by class to nationalism. For instance, in his limited discussion of James Larkin and the Dublin strikes in 1913 he notes the reports of the appalling housing conditions of the majority or the Dublin working class... "in looking for underling reasons why some of the Dublin working class were soon to diverge politically form the policies of the Nationalist Party, it may not be insignificant that the Corporation at this time was solidly Nationalist,m and Messrs O'Reilly, Corrigan and Crozier were enthusiastic supporters of Home Rule."

Thus the success of the earlier struggle over Land rights by the Irish poor, led to a corresponding decline in support for that nationalist movement. Kee seems surprised by this, but it seems to me not necessarily surprising. The poor had won significant gains, and while this struggle was in place and led by the Nationalists it had encouraged support for that cause. In the aftermath, Independence or Home Rule was not on the agenda and the movement declined. Discussing later nationalist movements Kee highlights the involvement of a wide variety of middle and (occasionally) upper class Irish nationalists. He stresses that what they had in common "was a passionate belief that Ireland should be in a position to defend her constitutional rights against every threat in the probable event of the Home Rule Bill becoming law." But in his list there are no representatives of the working class or their organisations.

This is not to say there isn't anything of interest in The Bold Fenian Men. Kee does at least record the amazing bravery of various nationalist movements. He also notes the way in which the ruling class is prepared to ignore or subvert democracy when their interests are threatened. In particular Kee highlights the way that the Orange Order was able to mobilise and threaten armed insurrection, mutiny and rebellion if Home Rule went ahead; supported to a great extent by various English politicians and military figures. Sadly it is all too clear that the Irish nationalists had too much faith in constitutions and parliamentary democracy, even as their opponents pledged to undermine these to protect their interests.

Ultimately Kee's book is flawed because his starting point is nationalism, not the wider class dynamics of Irish society. There is little here about the way that Britain is exploiting Ireland in the period, in fact, the British Parliament comes across as a relatively benign institution that is moderating the debate about Home Rule. In reality, Britain was a colonial power that has its own interests and the debates about independence were ones that reflected class struggle in Ireland and the competing interests of different capitalists. His dismissive account of the Easter Uprising of 1916 only underlines his mistaken approach.

Related Reviews

Kee - The Most Distressful Country
Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger
Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly

Christopher Hill - A Nation of Change and Novelty

This book is a collection of essays proving how great a historian Christopher Hill was. They demonstrate exactly how detailed Hill's knowledge of the English Revolutionary period was, and his ability to make links between subjects and contemporary politics. They are also incredibly polemical, one, for instance Abolishing the Ranters is a strident defence of the very existence of that religious grouping which had been denied at length in 1986 book by professor Colin Davis. Hill shows his mastery of the contemporary literature, the source material as well as an understanding of his opponents writing.

Ultimately this is a forceful defence of the idea that there was an English Revolution. The book is was written ten years into Thatcher's government and at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall - events that get passing mention in several essays. Hill is defending the idea of Revolution at a time when mass risings were taking place but the political framework of Communism was disappearing. Hill was too good a left-winger to believe that the regimes that were falling apart in Eastern Europe were actually socialist, but he understood that left wing politics were on the defensive. Colin Davies, for instance, "clearly regards [Gerrard Winstanley] as a pre-incarnation of Josef Stalin".

In this context, his essay The Word 'Revolution' is a wonderful piece of writing. It traces the development of the word Revolution through the Early Modern Period. At the beginning of the seventeenth century he argues, the word meant not the overturning of something, but a rotation of something. So when Gerrard Winstanley uses it, says Hill, he means that the "Diggers' object was not just to remove the Norman Yoke but to get back behind the Fall of Man, to a period outside history - the future millennium as well as Adam;s Paradise." There then follows a detailed summary of dozens of different uses of the word Revolution, each demonstrating an evolving use of the word through a period that saw Parliament challenge the King then defeat and behead him, followed by the return of the monarchy. But, in Hill's words:

1688 was a smudged compromise, and helped to prevent England ever having a revolutionary tradition in the sense that the USA, France and the USSR have revolutionary traditions. 1688 was 'glorious', bloodless, because fixed by an agreement between party leaders without involving 'the people' at all. If 1688 was a revolution, had there been a revolution in the 1640s? Voltaire in 1733 took for granted that the 1640s had seen 'une révolution en Angleterre', and this usage continued through the French Revolution to Guizot, to Karl Marx, and to European historical writing generally. But in England, although the shift in the meaning of 'revolution' had taken place well before 1688, the events of that year created new ambiguities. So we cannot think about the evolution of the word without thinking about the evolution of the society.

We also cannot think about it without the context of the times that Hill was writing in, and this is what gives his book a real edge. Hill also demonstrates a nuanced view of what Revolution was and is. In an earlier essay on Political Discourse he writes:

Historians who have failed to find long-term causes of the English Revolution, as well as those who have failed to notice that there was a revolution at all, have perhaps been looking for the wrong things in the wrong places. There were no revolutionaries who willed what happened, no Lenin: there were virtually no republicans in the Long Parliament. But there were tensions in the society, slowly building up in the decades before 1640: and there was an ideology, popularised by Fox and Beard, which in appropriate circumstances could become revolution, as it did in Cromwell.

Collections of essays are always hard to review even when, as in this book, they are discussing a common theme, albeit from many different directions. Some of the chapters here are heavily reliant on a detailed knowledge of a particular subject. I found Hill's article on Archbishop Laud nearly impenetrable mostly because I have very little knowledge of the specifics Hill writes about.

On the other hand, I thought the chapter on Gerrard Winstanley on Freedom was superb and I wish I had come across it earlier. Among many things Hill makes an important point that Winstanley writes about "mankind" rather than "man", meaning that he is including women in his vision of freedom, something that few (if any) of Winstanley's contemporaries considered. I also should highlight the chapter on radicals and Ireland in the period - which explains why they did not oppose the oppression of Ireland by Cromwell and others.

There is much in this collection for anyone studying the English Civil War and Revolutionary Period. Hill brings a freshness to these debates, even today, and his writing is full of humour as well as polemic. Surprisingly he also seems full of hope that thing will get better. He finishes his article on Winstanley with a comment and quote from The Diggers' leader which might well be written about Hill himself:

Winstanley failed; but his writings justify the words he prefixed to one of his Digger pamphlets: 'When these clay bodies are in a grave, and children stand in place, This shows we stood for truth and peace and freedom in our days.

Related Reviews

Hill - The World Turned Upside Down
Hill - God's Englishman
Hill - Liberty Against the Law
Hill - The Century of Revolution

Robert Kee - The Most Distressful Country

A recent trip to the North of Ireland prompted me to look at the history of Ireland. Robert Kee's Green Flag trilogy is often recommended as a good place to start to understand the historical developments that have led to the anachronistic situation we see today - the north of the Island part of the British State and the remainder "the South" an independent country.

Kee's book is not a complete history of Ireland, rather it is a history of the development of Irish Nationalism, used here in the sense of thinking of Ireland as a nation, rather than today when it might be used to distinguish a political outlook separate from that of the loyalists. The context for all of this is of course the fact that Ireland was Britain's first colony. The majority Catholic population were kept down trodden and oppressed while Britain used the Protestant landowning class to govern in its interests through a process of divide and rule.

That said, modern divisions - Catholic and Protestant - weren't necessarily appropriate historically. In the context of the struggle for Irish "nationalism" as Kee shows, many leading figures were Protestant. They were also keen to struggle for improvements to the rights for Catholics, who had historically had few rights. Take the famous figure Robert Emmet, who lead an uprising in 1803. Emmet was a wealthy Protestant who supported Catholic rights, in particularly their right to stand for parliament. The defeat of previous movements, including the United Irishmen, meant that Emmet could downplay the potential for the nationalist cause:

Asked by the Speaker if it were not so that 'the object next their hearts was a separation and a republic', Emmet replied: 'Pardon me, the object next their hearts was a redress of their grievances.;' He said that if such an object could be accomplished peaceably, 'they would prefer it infinitely to a revolution and a republic'.

The reality is, of course, that a redress of grievances could not happen without a struggle against British rule, and for some form of independence. The period covered in this volume covers some of the great movements for this, such as the United Irishmen's rebellion of 1798. These took place in the context of the French Revolution and it is interesting to  speculate what might have happened had the military support from France been successful, or better organised.

Kee is particularly good an analysing events when he puts class at the heart of his history. Take the debate about the "union" between Britain and Ireland that was passed in 1801. Kee writes:

Opinion about a union did not run clearly down any political or social dividing line. The most solid opinion seems to have been among the Orangemen who were very generally described as being against it. This to may seem a paradox in the light of later events, but it was a logical attitude at the time, for the Orangemen simply represented the most extreme expression of the Protestant point of view, namely that they held a dominant position in Irish society and the legislature as things were, and what they held they wanted to hold. Even in later times, after they had identified their interests with the Union they were always to make clear that, in the event of a clash between those interests and the Union, it was the Union they were prepared to sacrifice.

One of the strengths of Kee's book is that he doesn't focus just on the ideas or actions of prominent figures. He writes with sympathy and understanding of the majority of the Irish population, particularly its peasantry and shows how their confidence in struggling against the status quo rises and falls. He also covers the great tragedies that befall them, particularly the Potato Famine but also the route cause of their poverty - the way that land ownership was organised solely to profit the owners and those who sublet land, rather than those who did the work.

The book finishes just before a new outburst of radical nationalism, the Fenian movement, following the decline of the earlier struggles. I look forward to reading part two.

Related Reviews

Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger
Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts

Seán Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly

The excellent Rebel's Guide series from Bookmarks Publications continues with a timely publication of Seán Mitchell's A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly. This examines Connolly's life, his revolutionary activity and his politics.

Connolly was born in Scotland to an Irish immigrant family where, Mitchell points out, his early life in one of the poorest parts of Britain, his long monotonous, low paid work as a child and his seven years service in the British Army must have shaped Connolly's revolutionary politics. Mitchell shows that Connolly:

beyond his leading role as a labour agitator Connolly was also a self-educated revolutionary who understood the importance of ideas and theory. He was an avid reader and a prolific writer, publishing not only pamphlets and articles but also plays, poems and songs. He was one of the great popularisers of socialist ideas in the English language, but to communicate with immigrant workers in the US he taught himself rudimentary Italian, and was an avid student of Esperanto - the 'universal' language that many radicals of this time believed would one day unite workers around the globe.

Connolly spent time in the US, as an organiser for the IWW union and revolutionary activist, clashing with American socialist Daniel De Leon over how trade unionists should organise and fight.

But Connolly is most famous for his central role in the struggle to build socialist organisation in Ireland, and the struggle against British Imperialism. Here Mitchell's book is particularly good at making clear that Connolly never separated the two questions. Mitchell writes:

Connolly's Marxism led him to the understanding that the Irish National Question was a social question: 'The whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland' (Connolly, Labour in Irish History).

Unlike some in the Republican movement then, Connolly never saw the Irish bourgeoisie or landowners as allies in the fight for liberation. Mitchell explains:

The Irish bourgeoisie, according to Connolly, were not to be trusted. Even if rhetorically they supported independence, in the end they had 'a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism as against every historical attachment drawing them towards Irish patriotism' (Connolly, Labour in Irish History).... As he wrote elsewhere, 'No amount of protestations could convince intelligent workers that the class which grinds them down to industrial slavery can, at the same time, be leading them forward to national liberty' (Shan Van Vocht, August 1897).

As the centenary of the Easter Rising is marked this Easter weekend, all sorts of people that Connolly would probably have damned had he been alive today, are trying to link themselves to that historic struggle. Connolly was executed in the aftermath of the Rising, and Mitchell's book ends with a short account of the uprising, its mistakes, and Connolly's role at the centre of the fighting. Mitchell argues that the Rising had a "reasonable chance of success", and quotes Connolly to show that this was not simply a nationalist rising, but one for the Irish working class, "not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist".

The murder of Connolly by the British State will remain a testament to the brutality of the capitalists when trying to protect their wealth and system. Mitchell's book is a wonderfully concise introduction to the life and struggles of a man who was prepared to suffer poverty, personal tragedy and eventually death in the fight for a better world. This Rebel's Guide will both inspire and encourage readers to delve deeper into Connolly's writings.

Order A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly direct from the publishers here.

Related Reviews of other Rebel's Guides

Brown - Eleanor Marx
Campbell - Rosa Luxemburg
Orr - Sexism and the System - A Rebel's Guide to Women's Liberation
Birchall - Lenin
Gonzalez - Marx
Bambery - Gramsci
Choonara - Trotsky

Mike Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Ever so often you come across a book which profoundly shakes you. Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts is one of those. On every page there is a fact or figure that makes the reader rage with anger; every chapter is a ringing denouncement of capitalism and colonialism. It should be required reading for all those politicians, journalists and armchair generals who profuse to know what to do about the "Third World".

In the late Victorian era, a period stretching from roughly 1876 to 1900, a series of droughts and famines hit large areas of the world. Various studies, both contemporary and more recent, paint a truly appalling picture of the resultant deaths. A study by the medical journal The Lancet in the immediate aftermath suggested that 19 million Indian people died during the 1896-1902 famine. The totals from all the events, allowing for the variance of scientific debate suggest between 31.7 and 61.3 million died.

Mike Davis argues that these were not merely environmental disasters. Changing weather patterns were caused by the complicated ENSO changes of air-pressure and ocean temperatures. The El Niño effects certainly could be associated with dramatic changes in rainfall, or wind patterns that brought crop failure or flooding to large areas. In late Victorian times politicians and apologists for colonial policies made much of the supposed links between these weather patterns and regular famines. But Mike Davis argues that the economic policies and the particular nature of colonialism (specifically in the British Empire) made, in places as diverse as Brazil, India, the Philippines, Korea, Africa and China, the famines far worse. As Davis suggests, of the victims:

They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.

I've written elsewhere about the Irish Potato Famine and the way that British rulers application of the principles of Free Trade condemned thousands to starvation while grain was shipped out to be sold at a profit. What Davis describes is a similar process on an enormous scale:

Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion.. there were almost always surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims.

It is worth repeating this simple fact. That (with the possible exception of Ethiopia in 1899) Davis argues that there was almost always enough food or other supplies that could have helped the starving peasants. The people didn't just starve - sometimes they sold their children into slavery in the hope they would survive, or killed strangers and committed cannibalism, or ate tree bark and mud. But their deaths, or many of their deaths, could have been avoided.

Take the official report on the Bombay famine of 1899-1902, which concluded that "supplies of food were at all time sufficient and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture." In neighbouring Berar, commissioners said that "the famine was one of high prices rather than a scarcity of food."

The problem was that the hungry couldn't afford to eat. It was rarely that there wasn't food. For instance Davis argues that the problem in the case of India was that the British had transformed the old social relations. Under British rule, profit was king, but so was private land. The British destroyed the old economic relations that gave peasants access to communal land and resources like wells. They broke up the old social obligations that meant Chinese rulers stockpiled grain for famine outbreaks. They scrapped the requirements to build or maintain flood defences or dams, because they were considered native, and not valid scientifically. All these facts helped make famine far worse when it arrived. Indeed some of the most shocking descriptions here are when Davis contrasts the way that before colonialism, societies in India, Africa or China dealt far better with drought than under the Imperial era.

Indian Famine Victims 1877

But there was a reason the British behaved like this. Over the 19th century the peasants of South America, Africa, China and the Indian subcontinent became attached to a world market. In a case study from India, Davis describes how the real local power was the Manchester cotton barons who effectively, through their representatives in the Raj, imposed a cotton market on some of the most arable land in India. By changing the local taxes, getting rid of previous local government structures and altering property relations, the British turned the area into a vast cotton factory which produced wealth for the cotton owners of Lancashire, but poverty for the native Indians. When famine came the peasants had no crops to eat, but nor did they have enough money to buy food. The logic of the market was then to abandon them to their fate.

And the vast infrastructure that the Empire builders created, the roads and rail-roads didn't serve to bring food to the hungry, it took it to where the profits were to be made. In the 1870-80 famine, according to official reports, In Bombay and Madras Deccan, "the population decreased more rapidly where the districts were served by railways than where there were no railways." It was easier to take the food away with trains. Davis also writes on how modern industry failed the hungry:

The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.

This is not a happy book. When Mike Davis describes the vast celebrations for Queen Victoria's Jubilee that involved enormous feasts at a time of vast hunger, most readers will feel sick. I certainly did. But the really sad thing is that nothing has changed. Capitalism's distortion of agriculture through the creation of cash crops and the domination of large multinationals leaves millions still in a precarious place, and as Mike Davis suggests, all the evidence is that global warming will make El Niños worse in the future.

Anyone interested in the confluence of the environment and the economy and the impact upon human beings should read this book. But so should anyone who wants counter-arguments to those who suggest that Empire was a good thing for the majority of people in the world.

Related Reading

Davis - Planet of Slums
Davis - The Monster at Our Door
Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-9
Bello - The Food Wars
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis

Cecil Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-9

The Irish Potato Famine of 1845-9 probably resulted in 1.5 million deaths. A further million people fled the country looking for food and work. It's legacy, for millions of people in the Irish diaspora was a hatred of the British ruling class.

The potato blight that destroyed repeated crops was a purely natural phenomena. The starvation that followed however was entirely man made, and a direct result of racist, colonial attitudes of government in London. In addition, ministers were more interested in the profits of food merchants than the relief of the poor.

Cecil Woodham-Smith's social history of the period and of Ireland before and after the famine is a detailed extensive history of this sad period. She points fingers clearly, particularly at those ministers who would do nothing to provide assistance, seeing the Irish as a source of trouble, rather than people to help. "Would to God the Government would send us food instead of soldiers" lamented a starving citizen in County Mayo as soldiers arrived in the region.

Sir Charles Trevelyan, who oversaw relief efforts (such as they were) during the famine, had little but contempt for the Irish... "The Great evil with which we have to contend, is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." For Trevelyan, the greatest problem was that famine relief might upset the profits of merchants and undermine free trade.

Particularly during 1847, Ireland continued to export grain, which that year was a bumper harvest. The population had no money and no employment, and the grain crop was exported to pay rent. Speculators and landlords amassed huge profits - indeed Trevelyan saw opportunity for profit in the famine, rather than horror. At one point he ended relief completely as economic downturn arrived, saying that he would "leave the rest to God."

The author documents the few attempts at resistance - but the population was too exhausted and hungry to mount any serious attempts at rebellion or insurrection, and she shows how "the Irish people starved and died in one world, the landowning classes inhabited another."

First published in 1962 this book is a valuable read for anyone who thinks that there is something natural about natural disaster. It is a grim reminder that the rich and powerful care little for the poorest of the poor.

Related Reviews

Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts
Kee - The Most Distressful Country