Colonialism, Landlordism and the Rift of Ireland
Article originally published in Issue 3 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
by Des Hennelly
Marx and Engels on Ireland
Marx and Engels had a deep and sustained interest in Ireland’s history, its colonial economy and anti-colonial struggles. Marx’s studies of Ireland from the 1840s onwards informed Capital to a significant degree, and Engels’ Irish writings were based largely on his study visits in 1856 and 1869.
Marx was particularly interested in the central role that landlord-tenant social relations played in the extreme forms of economic, social, and national oppression imposed in Ireland under British colonial rule. He wrote “The domination over Ireland at present amounts to collecting rent for the English aristocracy”. [1]
Marx studied and wrote about the important role that the colonisation and exploitation of Ireland played in England’s economic development. He demonstrated how the development of 19th century British capitalism was in large part a function of relentless plundering of Irish people and soil for rent and cheap food to contribute to capital accumulation in Britain. In addition, his study of the ecological impacts of rack-renting in the decades before the famine and land clearing for pasture afterwards informed his studies of unsustainable relationships between humans and their natural environment, causing ‘an irreparable rift in the social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life’ [2], otherwise known as the ‘metabolic rift’. [3]
A rich land
Pre-19th century Ireland was known for the high quality of its soil. English agronomist Arthur Young toured in 1770, and in comparing the land and soils of England and Ireland noted “Natural fertility, acre for acre over the two kingdoms, is certainly in favour of Ireland”. French agronomist Leonce de Lavergne, noted that much of Ireland “…is rich land, with calcareous subsoil, what better could be conceived?” [3]
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain engaged in waves of land seizures and the planting of a largely absentee land-owning aristocracy. The subsequent exploitation of Irish land played a crucial role in the establishment and development of capitalism in Britain, with Ireland integrated into the imperial system as a source of cheap food for England’s industrial working class. Sourcing cheap food for workers was an important mechanism for the owners of capital to keep downward pressure on the wages of workers in Britain’s fast-growing industrial centres.
Emerging Irish industries were crushed to consolidate Ireland in the economic role of cheap food provider, as well as to eradicate any competitors to British industry. A policy of forced de-industrialisation ended significant textile industries. In 1800, there were 91 wool manufacturers in Dublin employing more than 4,000 workers. By 1840 this had been reduced to 12 manufacturers employing 682 people. Many of the manufacturers moved to Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and Spain to set up operations beyond British control. [4]
Rack-renting to famine
Direct rule was legally established in 1801, formalising Ireland as a colony. With the establishment of direct rule, the exploitation of people and land intensified rapidly as landlords squeezed tenants for escalating rents. The common practice was for landlords to employ middlemen to let the land to tenant farmers, and they in turn frequently sublet small plots to cottier peasant farmers. This intensely extractive system, known as rack-renting, drove agricultural practices designed to produce subsistence for large families from very small plots of land. Any improvements to the land generally incurred higher rents to extract increased value created by tenants. Inevitably this meant that little investment was made in the quality and sustainability of the soil.
Tenant farmers and cottiers mostly grew potatoes for subsistence, but with the passing of the Corn Laws in 1815 [5], demand for grain from Ireland grew and the output of grains increased as a cash crop. The growth of grain exports added to pressure on the soil as nutrients of the soil within the grain were permanently transported to Britain. The unrelenting rack-renting pressures on tenants meant fallow years to replenish soil nutrients became a financially impossible option for most. The digging up of sub-soils and the use of available fertilizers replaced some nutrients in the top-soil to sustain agricultural output, but decades of this kind of farming through the first half of the 19th century opened up a metabolic rift as the soil was gradually depleted of nutrients. Of this hyper-exploitation, Marx observed in Capital that “England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means of replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil”. [6]
Writing recently in The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark noted “During this period, the intensification and expansion of the rack-renting and conacre systems created a fragile agroecology, with an underlying metabolic rift in the nutrient cycle, which was extremely vulnerable to the famine that followed.” [7] An outbreak of potato blight in 1845 spread rapidly, destroying up to half of the potato crop that year, most of the crop in 1846 and all of it in 1847. The failure of a single crop relied on for subsistence pitched the Irish population into a catastrophe.
A devastated population
”Having praised the fruitfulness of the Irish soil between 1815 and 1846, and proclaimed it loudly as destined for cultivation of wheat by nature itself, English agronomists and politicians suddenly discovered that it was good for nothing but the production of forage”
- Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature
The depopulation of the famine removed many of the tenders of a weakened soil. This, coupled with a large increase in demand for meat due to outbreaks of cattle disease in Britain, prompted a switch by absentee landlords to less labour intensive, large scale pasture farming. To accelerate this switch, they began what Marx referred to as a “quiet business-like extinction” to clear the land beyond what death and emigration had already managed. James Connolly wrote of this era,
“The landlord class commenced evicting their tenants; breaking up small farms, and even seizing upon village common lands and pasture grounds all over the country with the most disastrous results to the labouring people and cottiers generally. Where a hundred families had reaped as sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places.” [8]
In 1841 there were 135,314 holdings of less than one acre. But by 1851, the number of such holdings had fallen to 37,728. There were 310,436 holdings of between one and five acres in 1841. By 1851 there were just 88,083. There were 252,799 farms of between five and fifteen acres in 1841; in 1851 there were 191,854. In contrast, there was an increase in farms of fifteen to thirty acres, and a much greater increase of those above thirty acres. [9]
It was a rapid and brutal process of depopulation. The death toll and emigration resulted in the population reducing by a third in the 10 years from 1845 and halving by 1911. An estimated one million people died or left between 1855-56 alone, while livestock numbers increased by a corresponding number in that year. [10] Eleanor Marx referred to Ireland as the Niobe of nations, after the Greek mythical mother weeping for her lost children. [11]
Cause and political effects
Marx and Engels emphasised the primacy of the role played by the social relations of absentee landlordism in the complex developments and events that led to the catastrophe inflicted on Ireland in the 19th century. In a less exploitative social setting, potato blight would not have had the uniquely devastating consequences that it did in Ireland. It was absentee landlords extracting the highest possible immediate rents, that drove a precarious subsistence farming system based on intense monoculture agriculture that produced food vulnerability and insecurity. It was here, in the social relations of absentee landlordism that the primary cause of the famine could be found.
Marx and Engels also studied the political effects of British colonial rule and landlordism in Ireland. Engels noted the rack-renting and devastation of the Irish population led to sustained resistance, repeated revolutionary movements and the Fenian upsurge in the 1860s. “After the most savage suppression, after every attempt to exterminate them, the Irish, following a short respite, stood stronger than ever before”. [12]
They saw the plight and liberation of Ireland as central to challenging and defeating British capitalism and empire. Reflecting on Daniel O’Connell’s “monster” meetings of 1843, Engels commented, “Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen and I could overthrow the entire British monarchy”. They also saw English colonial attitudes to Ireland, including amongst the working class, as a major barrier to the liberation of the English working class itself. Marx wrote, “it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland”. [13]
It was from their close studies of the interplay of social and national oppressions in Ireland that Marx and Engels developed their general analysis of resistance to colonial oppression that they applied to anti-colonial struggles across the world.
The scars and the damage still being done
The catastrophes of the 19th century arising from the social and economic relations of landlordism and extreme rent extraction have substantially shaped the Ireland of today. Our population of just under 7m is still well below the pre-famine peak of about 8.5 million people. In contrast, the world population is 6 times higher today than in 1850. Our natural environment and agriculture also bear deep scars from the 19th century. That era left Ireland dominated by a damaging and unsustainable preponderance of beef and dairy farming and agribusiness with all the devastating and continuing adverse effects on biodiversity.
The metabolic rift in Ireland today is highlighted by a recent report from The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ‘Ireland’s Environment – An Integrated Assessment 2020’. Despite the EPA’s limiting ideological frameworks, the report is an understated but useful assessment of the large and deepening rift with our natural environment. The report notes approximately 60% of agricultural land in Ireland is used for pasture and highlights the need to “step back from intensive agricultural and land-use practices that are affecting or posing threats to the environment and human health”. The report notes the very poor and rapidly deteriorating quality of our water and “the dramatic reduction in the number of Ireland’s most pristine rivers, which have fallen from over 500 sites to only 20 sites in 30 years”. Over half (53%) of suspected cases of pollution in rivers were caused by agricultural runoff. The report also finds that almost 90% of Ireland’s energy is still generated from fossil fuels, with almost a third of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from agriculture. This at a time when the planet is probably within a decade of reaching dangerous warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.
The report concludes “For climate, nature and water quality, the objective to deliver on people’s expectations to live in a healthy and protected environment will not be met in the short or medium-term (2030), unless there is an acceleration and full implementation of the measures needed to address these issues”.
We know that behind the understated words and terminology of the EPA lies a deep metabolic rift between people in Ireland and our natural environment that was first opened-up by the colonial landlord era and has continued and widened under a system that exists solely to deliver permanent exponential growth in capital.
In response to centuries of exploitation and damaging land use, ecosocialists need to develop policies for a comprehensive agroecological transition to food sovereignty. Such a transition needs to include proposals for access to land for new farmers, training and income supports, development of organic production systems and regenerative farming policies to restore healthy soil and ecosystems. In this, we need to work with food sovereignty movements, like Talamh Beo in Ireland and La Via Campesina internationally, that have the vision and the knowledge that is essential to what needs to be done. It is an agenda that is as urgent and essential as it is ambitious.
Notes
Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers 1971, p142
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm
Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers 1971, p182
Bellamy Foster, John and Clark, Brett, The Robbery of Nature, Monthly Review Press, 2020, p67
Protectionist laws enacted in 1815 to artificially keep up the price of home-grown grain by imposing heavy tariffs on all grain imported, other than from Ireland.
Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol 1
Bellamy Foster, John and Clark, Brett, The Robbery of Nature, Monthly Review Press, 2020, p71
Connolly, James, Labour in Irish History, Part 4 https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E900002-001/text004.html
Jackson, T. A, Ireland Her Own, Lawrence & Wishart, p262
Marx and Engles, Ireland and the Irish Question, p 138
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/ireland/ireland.pdf, p22
Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers 1971, p19
Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers 1971, p294