Spud duds
Posted on 03/19/2008 11:33:47 PM PDT by neverdem
THE feast of Ireland’s patron saint has always been an occasion for saluting the beautiful land “where the praties grow,” but it’s also a time to look again at the disaster that established around the world the Irish communities that today celebrate St. Patrick’s Day: the Great Potato Famine of 1845-6. In its wake, the Irish left the old country, with more than half a million settling in United States. The famine and the migrations changed Irish and American history, of course, but they drastically changed Britain too.
Americans may think of the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops, late blight, as a European phenomenon, but its devastations actually started with them. The origin of the fungal organism responsible, Phytophthora infestans, has been traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico, and the first recorded instances of the disease are in the United States, with the sudden and mysterious destruction of potato crops around Philadelphia and New York in early 1843. Within months, winds spread the rapidly reproducing airborne spores of the disease, and by 1845 it had destroyed potato crops from Illinois east to Nova Scotia, and from Virginia north to Ontario.
It then crossed the Atlantic with a shipment of seed potatoes ordered by Belgian farmers. They had been hoping that fresh stock would improve their yields. Unhappily, it brought the seeds of devastation.
The warm damp spring of 1845 enabled late blight to become an epidemic. By mid-July, the disease had spread throughout Belgium and into the Netherlands. It went on to infect an area from northern Spain to the southern tips of Norway and Sweden, and east to Northern Italy. It moved inexorably through the British Isles and reached Connemara, on Ireland’s west coast, in mid-October. The ruin of Europe’s potato crops was complete...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Bush’s fault.
He knew we were going to need a few extra Irish regiments to help beat the slavers in the Civil War.
So he sent Karl Rove back in time with the Tardis to do that whole tater thing.
And the British, despotic rulers of the Emerald Isle, did nothing.
The fungus might have come from the Americas. The potatoes did, too, in that case.
I am told that my family from Germany was ruined financially by another several years of potato blight during the Franco-Prussian war around 1871
islam.
“The Fungus That Conquered Europe
islam.”
Yeah. But only after the EUnix were rendered to castrati by repeated chopping of socialist utopianisms.
FR bookmark {{ and green potato skins }}
- half a million settling in United States - Settling. How warm and cuddly. Wrong. They were shipped penniless to Newfoundland and had to walk half starved down to Boston or NY.
Spud duds
I’m not sure about what the British did, but the Irish sure don’t like the Brits.
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What would you suggest they do? Curing the blight was beyond the technology of the time.
That’s because Irish nationalism is inward looking, backward looking, and very very selfish.
The Irish must be doing something right these days.
I know a number of Irish immigrants, mostly legal, though not all.
Quite a few have returned to Ireland where they see better future financial prospects than here in the States. These are all educated folks, people working in tech and financial services.
None of the Irish Famine books ever mention it was a widespread European problem.
A sarcastic story at the time was that Queen Victoria contributed 5 pounds Sterling to Irish famine relief but then thinking her subjects would be mad at the gesture, contributed 5 pounds to the Battersea Old Dogs Home to balance the generosity.
Blight has never gone away. I grow my own spuds here in Devon: and the recent succession of humid summers has provided perfect conditions for the fungus to flourish - particularly on the tomato crop. At least we now have some means of controlling it - although the remedies available to the non-commercial grower aren’t that effective.
It’s much more complicated than that. We tend to forget that the British Empire was not a benign affair committed to the spread of human rights and democracy (sure it was better than the French).
The Irish have a long and bloody history under British rule. There was the Potato famine and the Irish War of Independence (1919 - 1921).
Let us not forget that it was the Americans that forced the British and French to promote human rights and democracy outside their home countries (they didn’t do it willingly).
You'll have to show some evidence for that statement. I think the real reason was the British knew that what they were doing was wrong and changed due to internal pressures. I believe in general the British public favored giving their colonies their independence. There was certainly no way Ireland could stand up to the British army over time.
But many Brits knew that colonization would eventually lead to demands for independence. Prime Minister William Gladstone was a proponent of Irish independence back in the late nineteeth century. Like a lot of ideas the idea that Britain should not forcibly rule certain foreign populations is one that eventually became the prevailing idea among most Brits. I doubt we had much, or anything, to do with them changing.
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