The Political Economy of Potato

Nineteenth-Century Contexts
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The Political Economy of the Potato
David Lloyd
To cite this article: David Lloyd (2007) The Political Economy of the Potato, Nineteenth-Century
Contexts, 29:2-3, 311-335, DOI: 10.1080/08905490701623433
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Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Vol. 29, Nos 2–3, June/September 2007, pp. 311–335
The Political Economy of the Potato

David Lloyd
Department of English, University of Southern California
Downloaded by [Mardin Artuklu Uni] at 08:58 05 October 2015
davidcll@usc.edu
Nineteenth-Century
10.1080/08905490701623433
GNCC_A_262193.sgm
0890-5495
Original
Taylor
2007
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29
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DavidLloyd
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2007 (online)
Even at the risk of redundancy, it is still worth rehearsing what appear, after the
upsurge of research of the last decade or so, to be the facts of the case. The Irish
Famine, which commenced in 1845 with a failure of the potato crop and recurred
over large parts of the country until 1851, was the greatest demographic catastrophe
in European history. At least one million people died of starvation and a further
million left the country, commencing a trend of massive emigration that continued
unabated until the end of the last century. The Famine was thus directly responsible
for the disappearance of at least one quarter of the population, estimated in the
British census of 1841 at 8.1 million. As is well known, the vulnerability of the Irish
population to such a subsistence crisis was occasioned by the very abundance of the
potato, which was capable of remarkable reproduction on poor and marginal land
with the result that a family could subsist for almost the whole year on the yield of a
one-acre plot. Over the previous century, the Irish poor, dispossessed by settler colo-
nialism of the more fertile lands and driven onto the bogs and mountainsides, had
developed what is now understood to be a sophisticated and ecologically inventive
means of survival on the basis of the potato crop and had succeeded over and again
in reclaiming marginal land in the most inhospitable regions of the island, especially
along the western seaboard.1 Despite regular but generally short-lived and localized
failures of the potato crop, the success of the Irish in cultivating this root had
enabled both a high rate of population increase and the progressive subdivision of
landholdings. This system of potato cultivation on small, rented plots, combined
with occasional labor on larger farms for low wages or for payment in kind, was
known as cottierism.
Several factors contributed to the subdivision of holdings. Principal among these had
been the expropriation since the seventeenth century of agricultural land by large
landowners who tended, through the medium of the infamous “middlemen,” to extract
increasingly high rents in a system that became known as “rack-renting.” The picture
of the absentee landlord living in London on rents extracted from an increasingly
ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/08905490701623433
312 D. Lloyd
penurious Irish peasantry is complicated by the middle of the nineteenth century with
the emergence of a new tendency towards “improvement,” or the capitalist rationaliza-
tion of agriculture. Improvement demanded the consolidation of landholdings into
larger farms on English models, the concomitant enclosure of all but the most marginal
wasteland, the turn to labor-extensive grain farming and grazing, and the eviction of
the small-holding tenants. These landless tenants in turn placed further pressure on the
dwindling areas of cultivable land, with the consequence that the highest population
densities were concentrated on the poorest land. This peculiarity of Irish demographic
patterns was facilitated by two further factors: first, both the paucity of capital required
by the cottier, who needed only to purchase or borrow seed potatoes and a spade to lay
down a crop, and the relative ease and informality with which a family holding could
be subdivided enabled early marriages and child-bearing. Early marriage and high rates
of reproduction were the norm in pre-famine Ireland to an extent almost unimaginable
from the perspective of the highly conservative rural society that rapidly developed after
1850. Second, the persistence, in adapted forms, of an older Gaelic system of communal
landholding known as clachan or rundale ensured that most tenants would have access
to a variety of available land types, from the higher reaches of the mountain where a few
sheep might be grazed to the more fertile patches where potatoes or, on occasion, oats
could be cultivated. Given the high degree of subdivision, the clachan system came to
entail, to the horror of modernizing foreign observers, patchwork patterns of
landholding within which pieces of any family’s holdings could be scattered in tiny plots
across a neighborhood without apparent logic and certainly without any attempt at
consolidation.
Thomas Boylan and Timothy Foley have well documented English efforts through-
out the nineteenth century to disseminate political economic doctrine as part of a
project at once economic and political. The discourses of political economy, whose
interventions are, from the outset, linked with the framing of policy, aim at the trans-
formation, and not merely the description, of the condition of the Irish.2 The event of
the Famine thus irrupts into a structure that is at once material and discursive and is
itself structured as an event by discourses, already long in preparation, which furnish
the representations that frame British responses, ideological and practical, to Irish
hunger. The intersection of policy-making and political economy in effect transforms
a subsistence crisis into a famine by regulating the perception and interpretation of
Irish conditions along terribly determinate lines. That is, I will argue, at least in part
because the condition of Ireland up to the famine itself presents a theoretical anom-
aly, and at times even a critical abyss, for British political economy as a discourse, just
as it does for British colonial government in practice. For almost half a century prior
to the Famine, and for decades afterwards, Irish recalcitrance to British norms
catalyzes successive crises of governmentality, producing an effect of perpetual transi-
tionality, as British policies successively seek to produce the regimes and the measures
by which the transformation of the Irish character, its gradual subjection to British
models of civility, might be attained. The Famine as an event partakes in a structure of
longer duration that David Scott has described, in a different context, as “colonial
governmentality”:
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 313
… colonial power came to depend not merely upon inserting English ideas here or there,
but upon the systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the
colonized was lived. It became, in short, “revolutionary,” inasmuch as, guided by abstract,
universal principles regarding the supposed relation between moral conditions and moral
character, it now saw as integral to its task the rational possibility of so altering those
conditions as to alter fundamentally that character in an improving direction. (41)3
Those terms, “character,” “condition,” “improvement,” define precisely the parame-

ters of the British interventions in nineteenth-century Ireland that give the Famine its
meaning and specific consequence. And it is political economy that to a very large
extent determines the direction and rationale of Ireland’s improvement together with
the institutional means to the transformation of its conditions.
Indeed, as Denis Meuret has argued, what Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations inaugu-
rates is less an economic doctrine than “the governmental discourse of the modern
world,” offering, “through a new representation of the economy … a new definition of
the state’s legitimacy, of its role and of its relation with citizens” (231, 227). In Ireland,
that “new definition” involves at once the successive attempts to give British rule legit-
imacy and the no less crucial delegitimation of Irish cultural formations that were
deemed recalcitrant to a rational political economy. It is in this struggle over legitimacy
that, as both Collison Black and Boylan and Foley have shown, the terms of British polit-
ical economy shift in order to take account of Irish differences and, in turn, British
prescriptions lead to the emergence of new Irish social formations that remain out of
kilter with British norms. Irish conditions are at once the object and the test of political
economic theory. Its inability to accommodate those conditions to its theoretical
assumptions leads by the end of the century to the displacement of “political” by
“national” economy, the latter emerging with the gradual recognition of the necessity
to take into account the disparate forms and practices of regional and local economies.
The transformation of economic theory, however, involves not merely an adjustment
in order to accommodate an anomalous reality, but the subjection of the Irish to a new
developmental discourse that “saves” political economy and its associated anthropol-
ogy at the expense of the threatening alternative that, I will contend, Ireland for a time
represented. From the perspective of a gradually consolidating industrial capitalism and
in the terms of the political economy that is its discursive counterpart, Irish conditions
are not merely an anomaly, but a scandalous and potentially destabilizing alternative
to the economic and political forms that the reproduction of capital requires.
The two principal anomalies that British economists and administrators encoun-
tered in Ireland may be summed up as land and population, the distinct but related and
recurrent objects of colonial governmentality. Underlying the problems that each
caused we may discern a fundamental problem of reproduction, in the double sense of
Ireland’s apparently prodigious capacity for sexual reproduction and the more theoret-
ical sense, deeply associated with the former, of Ireland’s tendency to reproduce social
formations that were tenaciously recalcitrant to capitalist economic and political
transformation. With regard to both land and population, the Famine was seen, quite
literally as a godsend, a providential intervention that operated in conformity with the
lessons that political economy itself had been teaching for decades. Charles Trevelyan,
314 D. Lloyd
the Treasury Secretary in charge of Famine relief, put it as follows in “The Irish Crisis”,
an essay written at the end of 1847, a moment he took to be the end of the Famine but
that subsequent historians regard as its critical midpoint:
Unless we are much deceived, posterity will trace up to that famine the commencement of
a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will
acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom has educed
permanent good out of transient evil. (229–30).
Trevelyan’s providential view of the Famine, one largely shared by even those secular
economists who did not regard it as an actual divine intervention, is largely responsible
for his hardly unjust reputation as an inhumane and doctrinaire administrator of
inappropriate laissez faire measures. There is little doubt that his administration’s
refusal to interfere in the grain market or to invest more substantial imperial funds in
famine relief is largely responsible for the enormous toll of the Famine, whatever
the underlying structural reasons for the subsistence crisis itself and for the weakness
of the local institutions responsible for relief.4 From Trevelyan’s perspective, however,
the Famine was the fulfilment of a prognosis that had been circulating among econo-
mists since Malthus’s infamous remark in a letter to Ricardo, that “a great part of the
population should be swept from the soil” (qtd. in Mokyr 38). As “The Irish Crisis”
makes plain, the drastic reduction in the Irish population, as the combined result of
Famine deaths and assisted and enforced emigration, and the failure of the potato itself
as a subsistence crop, appear to clear the way also for the solution to the problems of
the land. The reduction in the number of cottiers and landless laborers would reduce
pressure on the land, enabling the consolidation of small-holdings into larger units and
the establishment of capitalist farming as the norm. Irish society would approximate
more to that of England, with a clear division between the capitalist farmer and the
proletarianized, landless laborer. The foundation of that capitalist economy was to be
corn, rather than the formerly dominant potato:
A large population subsisting on potatoes which they raised for themselves, has been
deprived of that resource, and how are they now to be supported? The obvious answer is,
by growing something else. But that cannot be, because the small patches of land which
maintained a family when laid down to potatoes, are insufficient for the purpose when laid
down to corn or any other kind of produce; and corn cultivation requires capital and skill,
and combined labour, which the cottier and conacre tenants do not possess. The position
occupied by these classes is no longer tenable, and it is necessary for them to live by the
wages of their labour. They must still depend for their subsistence upon agriculture, but
upon agriculture conducted according to new and very improved conditions. Both the
kind of food and the means of procuring it have changed. The people will henceforth
principally live upon grain, either imported from abroad or grown in the country, which
they will purchase out of their wages; and corn and cattle will be exported, as the piece-
goods of Manchester are, to provide the fund out of which the community will be
maintained under the several heads of wages, profits, and rents. (Trevelyan 303–04)5
In consequence of the Famine, Ireland, according to Trevelyan’s ghoulishly smug
assessment, is on the point of realizing the “new and very improved conditions” that
had long been the design of political economists, the supplantation of the cottier
system “by capitalist farming, on the English model” (Black 243). The break with the
past that the Famine inaugurates is administratively symbolized by his endorsement
of proposals for easing the sale of “incumbered estates,” as if the Famine ushers in a
future free of the burdensome entail of the past (Trevelyan 243). Both the indebted
Irish landlord and the surplus cottier population are to be liquidated and redeemed in
a providential historical dispensation that makes way for a rationalized capitalist farm-
ing according to political economic principles and the division of rent, capital, and
labour that is the basis of well-regulated social relations.
It is in the intimate connection between the material conditions that sustained the
prodigious reproduction of the Irish poor between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-
nineteenth century and the reproduction of a culture enabled by those conditions that
the significance of Irish hunger lies. In thinking about the Famine, it is at moments
crucial to dispense with the satisfactions of hindsight in order that the appearance of
inevitability of a crisis of such magnitude should not structure in advance our
attempts to comprehend not what happened but what meanings circulated around the
event. For the materialist cultural historian, the actual outcome of multiple social
vectors is less important than the swirling eddies of possibility out of which that
outcome emerged. With hindsight, it came to seem that the Famine was the inevitable
consequence of an excessive Irish population that depended overly on a single crop,
but neither for contemporary observers nor for more recent historians does that
appear clearly to be the case. The Famine is one of those singular accidents that seem
to reorganize the preceding and subsequent constellations of events into a predeter-
mined pattern, thus coming to appear the only possible occurrence. The force of veri-
similitude of such an event endows it with the power to seize hold of the field of
probability and to impose a unique sense on history. It becomes then all the more
important to reopen painstakingly the indeterminate constellations of discourse and
practice out of which that event condensed, constellations in which there lurked, and
are still discernable, the specters of other possibilities. In the case of the Famine, that
process is all the more difficult, not only because its terrible death toll hangs over any
attempt to comprehend it, adding, as it were, the moral force of commemoration to
the dismal appearances of historical determinism, but also because the archive to
which one must turn for evidence about the condition of the Irish is so unrelievedly
negative about the social and cultural formations that went down in the event with
such seeming inevitability.
Yet, contrary to what one might assume, the inevitability of a devastating famine in
Ireland was by no means self-evident to contemporary observers. It is not clear that the
decline in the rate of population increase prior to the Famine, established by recent
demographers, was apparent to contemporary observers.6 Despite this, the size of the
Irish population does not seem to have been perceived as presenting what we might
think of as a “Malthusian” crisis. Estimates as to the size of the existing population and
of the numbers that could be supported on Irish resources varied widely and depended
on the assumptions made as to Ireland’s potential for industrial development. It was
not, therefore, self-evident that the Irish population had reached some critical point
that made disaster inevitable. Even Thomas Malthus, writing early in the century some
ten years after the publication of his Essay on the Principle of Population, was less
316 D. Lloyd
concerned as to the imminence of famine than with the potential for the political
exploitation of religious distinctions and other discontents and therefore with the need
to integrate Ireland more fully into the United Kingdom. His attitude to Irish popula-
tion growth in his review of Thomas Newenham’s Inquiry into the Population of Ireland
seems, with post-Famine hindsight, almost sanguine:
Although it is quite certain that the population of Ireland cannot continue permanently to
increase at its present rate, yet it is as certain that it will not suddenly come to a stop. Mr.
Newenham, assuming that it will go on for some time, at least, as it has done of late years,
supposes that the country will contain 8,413,224 inhabitants in 1837; and enters into
an elaborate calculation to show that it is fully capable of maintaining such a number.
Knowing the uncertainties of all particular estimates of future population, we shall not give
our sanction to the present, though it is certainly not impossible, nor even very improbable;
and we feel confident, that a much greater population might in time be supported in that
country if potatoes continue to be its staple food…. It is quite clear, however, that if Ireland
can only maintain the number which the present rate of increase will produce in 1837, such
a number will not be found in it in so short a period. Both theory and experience uniformly
instruct us, that a less abundant supply of food operates with a gradually increasing pressure
for a very long time before its progress is stopt. It is difficult indeed to conceive a more
tremendous shock to society, than the event of its coming at once to the limits of the means
of subsistence, with all the habits of abundance and early marriages which accompany a
rapidly increasing population. But, happily for mankind, this never is, nor ever can be, the
case. The event is provided for by the concurrent interests and feelings of individuals long
before it arrives; and the gradual diminution of the real wages of the labouring classes of
society, slowly, and almost insensibly, generates the habits necessary for an order of things
in which the funds for the maintenance of labour are stationary. (345)7
The conclusion Malthus draws is not that the drastic decrease of Irish population
growth is imminent, but that, although “the causes of its retardation will be felt” (346),
the population will continue to grow for quite some time and that the problems the
English face with Ireland lie rather in the potential disaffection of a possible “twenty
millions of people” (343; Malthus’s emphasis) than in the imminent prospect of their
starvation.
Malthus’s prognosis for Ireland is thus far from “Malthusian” in the sense that that
expression is now understood. Nonetheless, it is typical and possibly seminal in setting
the terms for the response of political economists to Ireland’s prodigious capacity for
reproduction. This response has less to do with hunger and distress than with the social
and political impact on Britain of an increasing Irish population with cultural habits
that are not only alien but in many respects antithetical to the values that a burgeoning
capitalism sought to reproduce in its own working classes. We may say that the prob-
lem of Ireland was paradoxically not scarcity, but abundance: abundance of population
and abundance of the means to support that population, an abundance notoriously
supplied by the potato. It is the specter of abundance, rather than that of distress, that
haunts political economy and makes Irish conditions a scandal in theory and a night-
mare for practical policy. In that sense, the event of the Famine is a godsend not only
to the administrator but to the theorists too, apparently confirming precepts whose
predictive validity was made questionable by the condition of Ireland. The image of
Irish misery in the first half of the nineteenth century is so self-evident to us at this
point that it is easy to overlook how earnest and arduous the production of that image
actually was. To say so is not to minimize the actual hardship of the Irish poor nor to
idealize their conditions, but rather to interrogate how the meaning of those conditions
was produced and transformed, both differentially, in relation to the condition of their
British counterparts, and in conformity to the emerging theory of political economy.
We can trace the changing signification of Irish wretchedness, and the counter-
image of Irish abundance and content, from the very moment of the emergence of
classical political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously remarks
on the health and beauty of the Irish poor as he encountered them in London:
The common people in Scotland, who are fed with oatmeal, are in general neither so
strong, nor so handsome as the same rank of people in England who are fed with wheaten
bread…. But it seems to be otherwise with potatoes. The chairmen, porters, and coalheav-
ers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men
and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the greater
part of them from the lowest rank of the people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this
root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being
peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution. (265)
Notably, Smith’s evaluation of the social effects of the potato’s dissemination as a staple
is unhedged with anxiety:
Should this root ever become in any part of Europe, like rice in some rice countries, the
common and favourite vegetable food of the people, so as to occupy the same proportion
of the lands in tillage which wheat, and other sorts of grain for human food do at present,
the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much greater number of people,
and the labourers being generally fed with potatoes, a greater surplus would remain after
replacing all the stock [capital] and maintaining all the labour employed in cultivation. A
greater share of this surplus, too, would belong to the landlord. Population would increase,
and rents would rise much beyond what they are at present. (264–65)8
Smith here notes, with some prescience, the capacity of the potato not only to repro-
duce labor but to enable the reproduction and increase of capital in the form of surplus
value, a fact that underlies the extraordinary depletion of capital from rural Ireland by
rackrenting in the course of the nineteenth century. What he does not foresee is that
this “primitive accumulation” of capital could lead to a crisis of over-population that
would affect the United Kingdom as a whole. His view seems in retrospect remarkably
positive.
Arthur Young, traveling in Ireland at virtually the same moment, is, if anything, even
more affirming of the positive qualities of the Irish laborers’ mode of life. Not only are
the Irish physically healthy, “as athletic in their form, as robust, and as capable of
enduring labour as any upon earth,” they are moreover better off in real terms than
their English counterparts:
That the Irishman’s cow may be ill-fed, is admitted; but, ill-fed as it is, it is better than the
no cow of the Englishman; the children of the Irish cabbin [sic] are nourished with milk,
which, small as the quantity may be, is far preferable to the beer or vile tea which is the
beverage of the English infant; for nowhere in a town is milk to be bought. Farther, in a
country where bread, cheese, or meat, are the common food, it is consumed with great
318 D. Lloyd
oeconomy, and kept under lock and key, where the children can have no resort; but the
case with potatoes is different, they are in greater plenty, the children help themselves; they
are scarce seen without being in the act of eating them, it is their employment all day long.
Another circumstance not to be forgotten, is the regularity of the supply. The crop of
potatoes, and the milk of the cow is more regular in Ireland than the price at which the
Englishman buys his food. In England, complaints rise even to riots when the rates of
provisions are high; but in Ireland the poor have nothing to do with prices, but crops of a
vegetable very regular in its produce. (2: 41–42)
Young’s emphasis on the benefits to the Irish of belonging in a subsistence, largely non-
monetary economy are the antithesis of later political economists’ desire to see the Irish
develop a cash economy.
If, for Young and Smith, the nutritional advantages of the potato are morally
indifferent and even productive of comparative content and health, for later econo-
mists the potato seems irrevocably connected to moral and political as well as economic
characteristics that are recalcitrant to capitalist development and ingrained in the Irish.
The potato ceases to be a contingent crop and becomes the root of Irish evil. From
Malthus to Trevelyan a trajectory is established that culminates in the latter’s brusque
expostulation: “what hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?” (230).9 The
shift in the economic analysis of the grounds and the dangerous potentialities of Irish
conditions could be said to follow the track of what Keith Tribe suggests is the gradual
emancipation of political economy from its embeddedness, through Smith, Malthus,
and even Ricardo, in what is still a fundamentally agrarian model for capital (102–03,
132–33). The historicist conception of Ireland that will emerge in political economy as
it does in ethnography by the post-Famine period, that is, the view that Irish conditions
are the index of its historical backwardness, is not an immediately apparent given of
political economists before John Stuart Mill and J.E. Cairnes. Ireland is, rather, a
crucial locus in the gradual transformation of political economy’s terms from those of
a still agrarian universalism to the historicist assumptions that provide the outlines of
a discourse on development that is still all too familiar to us now.10
For Smith, the effects of the potato becoming the staple of the majority of the labor-
ing population were still a matter for speculative curiosity. Writing some three decades
later, Malthus begins to descry in Ireland the first results of that experiment, though the
final outcome remains a matter of speculation, though of one considerably more
anxious:
It is the first and only country that has yet fully taken to a species of food, which, at the
most, requires only one third of the land necessary to yield the same nourishment in wheat.
Its effects, hitherto, have been truly astonishing; and in its future progress, it may be
expected to produce proportionate results. We should not wonder if Ireland were destined
to become an instance of the greatest density of population yet known in the world: and it
has sometimes struck us as possible, that the prodigious physical force thus created in a
particular country, might, like the standing armies introduced into modern Europe by
France, occasion the adoption of the same system in neighbouring states. We own that we
do not contemplate such a change as favourable to the happiness of mankind. (343–44)
Already the “prodigious” and “astonishing” increase in population appears as an

anomaly that contradicts prior economic assumptions, the correlation that Hume and
Smith, according to Malthus, had predicted between the “causes of increase” of popu-
lation and “‘wise institutions,’ and an ‘increasing demand for labour’” (339). As we
shall see, the Irish instance continues to be anomalous for the categories of political
economy and for the institutional regulation of the reproduction of labor that its
precepts demand. Yet, writing in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, and at a time of
agricultural prosperity, Malthus’s concerns are principally political rather than
economic. It is this contingent set of circumstances, however, that leads him to sketch
a seminal if speculative correlation between the material conditions that the potato as
a staple produces and the reproduction of a determinate set of cultural and political
characteristics. Malthus’s analysis is worth quoting at some length:
Universally, it will be found, that political degradation is accompanied by excessive
poverty; and that the opposite state of society is the most efficient cause of the general
spread of comforts among the lower classes. We have little doubt, that the political
degradation of the Irish poor powerfully contributed to make them adopt potatoes as
their principal food; and in the curious question, whether, at a future distant period, the
greater part of the population of Europe will be supported upon potatoes? much will
depend upon the character of the governments which the present convulsions may termi-
nate. The establishment of an universal despotism, and the exclusion of the lower and
middle classes of society from all share in the government, by annihilating in a great
degree individual importance and dignity, would have a strong tendency to make the poor
submit to the lowest and cheapest kind of sustenance; and it is quite certain, that if they
once consent to produce an adequate supply of labour on the cheapest sort of food, they
never will be able to obtain any thing better. On the other hand, if the present convulsions
of the civilized world should leave behind them improved forms of government, it is
probable, that the decent pride occasioned by a superior political condition, will make the
lower classes of society look forward to something besides mere support, and not only
prevent them from falling to potatoes, but raise the quality of their food above what it is at
present. The causes which, independently of soil and climate, have actually determined
the chief food of the common people in the different kingdoms of Europe, seem to have
been their political state, and the periods of prosperity or adversity, with regard to the
funds for the maintenance of labour, which they may have gone through. And when the
character of the food has been determined in any particular country by these causes,
though it continues always susceptible of changes, yet it changes slowly and with diffi-
culty, and a union of favourable circumstances is necessary to produce the effect. A coun-
try which, from a previous state of general depression, had been long in the habit of living
upon the lowest kind of food, might pass through a period of considerable agricultural
prosperity, and feel it chiefly in the rapid increase of population, and not in an improve-
ment of the diet and comforts of the lower classes. On the other hand, a people which,
from a course of favourable circumstances, had been in the habit of living on the best
wheaten bread, might, from checks to their agriculture or commerce, suffer long and
severe want, before they would consent to a change in their diet; and the effect of such
checks would be felt rather in the retardation of the population, than in the adoption of an
inferior kind of food, or a different standard of comfort. (352–53)
Malthus’s arguments are significant in two ways. Firstly, they run the gamut of terms
in which Irish conditions will continue to be addressed: the role of the potato in
sustaining “a rapid increase in population,” or at least an unusually large one; the
potato as indelibly linked to Irish poverty and an excessive pool of labor; the need to
convert the population to a diet of “wheaten bread” like that of their English
320 D. Lloyd
counterparts; and, not least, the relation of these factors to the problem of a political
culture based in the opposition of individualism to political despotism. Secondly, he
establishes this matrix of terms prior to 1815, when the defeat of the French and the
end of the wartime agricultural boom not only initiates the series of economic crises
that afflict pre-Famine Ireland but, more significantly here, signals the consolidation of
the era of Britain’s global economic and political hegemony. For Malthus, the outcome
of the “present convulsions of mankind” remains uncertain. The shadow of Irish
uprisings in 1798 and 1803, linked to the claims of French republican ideology, is still
palpable, though recast, in Burkean terms, as that of despotism rather than of emanci-
pation. Clearly paramount throughout this essay is the probability that Irish alienation
and discontent will once again provide the avenue for French incursions into Britain.
In such a moment of political uncertainty, what emerges is no less a discursive
apprehension that the ends of history remain open. In this transitional moment, the
possibility is manifest that Ireland’s conditions rather than England’s represent the
horizon of the future. As so often, the opening call for reform is based on a moment of
imperial danger, the need for relief pragmatic rather than altruistic, and directed
towards assimilation and the consolidation of Empire rather than driven by specific
Irish needs or demands. But Malthus rapidly and explicitly universalizes his analysis:
“Universally … political degradation is accompanied by excessive poverty.” Concom-
itantly, as so often in Ireland, governmental intervention, albeit indirect, is to supple-
ment the operation of economic laws, precisely because the Irish instance over and
again demonstrates the infeasibility of the disciplinary and practical separation of the
political and the economic. The economic collapses into a political anthropology.
That discursive collapse seeks to establish here that the conditions of poverty under
despotism represent, in fact, an actual collapse of the political with the economic which
prevents the development of a dynamic economy. In a rhetorical descant that is
pronounced rather than demonstrated, despotism issues in the consumption of
potatoes and both are linked, from above and below, as it were, to the failure of
individuation. What is signal here is the capacity for Malthus’s logic to invert itself.
Though he establishes as the primary cause that “has determined the chief food of the
common people” to be their “political state,” and links the chains of their degradation
downwards from there, the following movement of the argument suggests that once
established, the diet of the people becomes no less the determining factor in the repro-
duction of their habits of life. Consumption of the potato as the staple food permits not
only the astonishing rate of reproduction of the Irish population but the reproduction
of their cultural tendencies against individuation and their inclination towards
economic and political dependency.
The matrix of terms that Malthus here establishes remains, through various
permutations, that through which the elements of the “Irish question” are mapped,
politically, economically, and culturally for most of the nineteenth century. It functions
as a virtual rhizome, at whose metaphorical root lies the potato, that continually
connects those distinct domains and leads to their incessant confusion. In tracking
their permutations, however, we should not lose sight of the persistent if occluded fact
that to the practical, legislative, or administrative problems the colony poses to British
rule, there remains attached the specter of the threatening alternative that Ireland
presents to the unfolding hegemony of a capitalist economy and its gradually emerging
state formation. Negatively as it is, and must be, represented, insistently as Irish misery
replaces the fleeting glimpse of Irish content, the shadow of an unruly Irish surplus
persists as an opening into otherness, recalcitrant and inassimilable, that threatens
constantly to overwhelm the discursive and political boundaries that are produced to
contain it.
For political economy, it is in the first place this sheer surplus of Irish population that
scandalizes. The problems it poses are at once practical and theoretical. The practical
problems are well known and documented. In Ireland, numerous inquiries into the
conditions of the poor culminate in the new Irish Poor Laws, establishing the national
network of Poor Law Unions and workhouses that so notoriously collapsed during the
Famine. Irish poverty threatened to and in the Famine itself ultimately did overwhelm
the institutions established to contain it and the financial resources made available,
whether through local rate levies or Treasury grants. That story has been told in such
detail elsewhere as not to need rehearsing here.11 Generally, however, the failure of the
Poor Law institutions and supplementary measures during the Famine has been
ascribed to the application in relief policy of the more or less scientific principles of
political economy, usually encapsulated as “laissez-faire.” Though, as we have already
seen, there is some truth to this argument, what has not been sufficiently emphasized
is the fact that across the Famine, and not only during the unfolding of its horrific
effects, the theoretical terms of political economy constantly veer to a moral rather than
“purely economic” rhetoric when confronted with Irish conditions. The very alterity of
those conditions throws into relief the failure of political economy to accomplish its
scientific ends in separation from the ideological and cultural formations that are
secreted in its universal laws. Indeed, one of the achievements of the liberal economists
in the post-Famine period will be the recuperation of economics by way of a cultural
historicism that enables it to fix the troubling particularity of those problematic Irish
anomalies. For the orthodox or classical political economy that dominated the analysis
of Ireland up to and during the Famine, however, Irish conditions were at once
theoretically recalcitrant and morally repugnant.
J.R. McCulloch, in his classic Principles of Political Economy, spells out the problem-
atic nature of Irish reproduction in a way that encapsulates the line of orthodox theory
that runs from Malthus to Nassau Senior and McCulloch himself. McCulloch’s
remarks come in the course of his discussion of wages, as he makes the distinction
between “the Market or Actual Rate of Wages” and “the Natural or Necessary Rate of
Wages,” a distinction that is crucial to political economy’s understanding both of the
“free market” in labor and of the fluctuations in wages that confront a laboring popu-
lation denied co-operation or unions. A section of the chapter on wages is devoted to
each. The market or actual rate is evidently that which actually obtains at a given
moment in any country or locality and is held to be based on the proportion between
population and available capital: “[T]he quantity of produce apportioned to each
labourer, or his wages rated in commodities, is determined by the ratio which the
capital of the country bears to its labouring population” (397). The more the available
322 D. Lloyd
capital, the larger the wage fund; the greater the laboring population, the more draw on
that wage fund and the lower wages fall. By this logic—and it is identical to that which
Malthus deploys in 1808—over time the laboring population should stabilize into
equilibrium with the available capital. A fall in wages obliges the population to restrain
reproduction while a rise in wages due to an increase in capital will stimulate an
increase in population. The demographic logic here assumes, however, a certain funda-
mental “natural or necessary wage,” the lowest subsistence that the laborer can or will
accept:
The race of labourers would become extinct were they not supplied with the food and
other articles sufficient, at least, for their support and that of their families. This is the
lowest limit to which the rate of wages can be permanently reduced; and for this reason it
has been called the natural or necessary rate of wages. (406)
As McCulloch admits, however, there can, despite the name given to it, be no “fixed
and unvarying” natural rate of wages. He cites the authority of Adam Smith on this
issue:
By the natural or necessary rate of wages, is meant only, in the words of Adam Smith,
such a rate as will enable the labourer to obtain, “not only the commodities that are
indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country
renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without.” Now it
is plain, from this definition, that there can be no absolute standard of natural or
necessary wages. (411)
In this acknowledgement, the notion of a universally identical “race of labourers”

begins to succumb to the problematic prospect of cultural or racial difference. As Adam
Smith’s expression here makes clear, the question of demography, the mere biological
reproduction of that race of laborers, is intimately bound up with their cultural repro-
duction, with “custom,” “decency,” or cultural formation. And that cultural reproduc-
tion is no less crucial to the economic reproduction of capital, to the reproduction both
of the labor that it requires, with its various skills and disciplines, and, as is already
becoming apparent, to the reproduction of habits of consumption that enable the
circulation of commodities, both labor itself as a commodity and the articles it
produces and consumes
Malthus, as we saw, had assumed that the Irish population increase would be
“retarded” either by Irish poverty or by an elevation in their living standards and expec-
tations, such that what McCulloch terms their necessary wage would increase (353). It
is far from apparent to subsequent political economists, whatever recent demographic
analysis suggests, that any such thing had actually occurred in the intervening three or
four decades. To the contrary, Irish reproduction defied the laws of political economy
and continued to increase despite the notorious and frequently lamented lack of avail-
able capital in the country. Whether on account of the dearth of skilled labor, or on that
of the supposed insecurity of investment in a country troubled by ceaseless agrarian
unrest and urban combination, or, as seems no less probable, on account of the gradual
drain of capital in the form of rent paid to absentees, and, indirectly, through the export
of unworked produce, Ireland was subjected to a continual lack of the capital necessary
for the development or “improvement” of its undoubtedly rich natural resources.
Nassau Senior’s essay on the condition of Ireland in 1843 summarizes these problems,
dividing Ireland’s evils into the “material” and the “moral”: “The material evils are the
want of Capital, and the want of small Proprietors. The moral evils are Insecurity,
Ignorance, and Indolence” (192). Proposing for Ireland the standard prescription, the
establishment of an English-style capitalist farming, he acknowledges that in the
present state of Ireland, the only means to achieve that end would be “the introduction
of capital from abroad” (196). An underdeveloped Ireland, with considerable resources
and potential, would appear “to afford a field in which the surplus capital of England
and Scotland might set to work her own surplus population.” Yet “there is something
in the institutions of Ireland, or in the habits of her people, which deters British capital
from one of its most natural, and apparently one of its most productive employments”
(197). Ireland’s “Moral evils…exclude the remedies for her Material evils” (197–98).
Those moral evils, which have been at work “a period sufficient to form the character
of a nation” (199), lie principally in the Irish refusal of law, or, more accurately, in their
adherence to a principle of counter-legality, “a rival law, with rules and sanctions of its
own” (200). This law, which is in effect not only in the agrarian movements but also in
the urban “combinations,” is in effect even when it is not manifested in particular acts
of violence. In consequence, “the insecurity of a community in which the bulk of the
population form a conspiracy against the law, must prevent the importation of capital”
(204). Such combinations are also a proof of the ignorance of the Irish, leading only to
“hopeless poverty” in the country and “weeks of high wages, and months without
employment” in the towns (205). Added to these conditions is the habitual indolence
of the Irish, which is at first predicated more on national conditions than essential
racial characteristics, bar one that will become crucial to the shifting discourse on the
Irish, namely, their greater need of “overlooking” than English or Scottish workers
(205). The vicious circle that results is evident to Senior:
It is easy, at least comparatively so, to describe the Moral and Material defects of Ireland.
It is easy to show how mutually they act and react. It is easy to show how insecurity
occasions want of capital—how want of capital occasions idleness and misery—and how
idleness and misery lead to turbulence and insecurity, until the result is a circle of
calamities, each in turn creating, aggravating, and recreating the others. (209)
It is the want of capital at the core of this vicious circle that transforms Irish absentee-
ism in turn from a matter of economic indifference, as it is, for example, in Scotland,
into a drain of “raw produce” that is processed and consumed in England instead of
Ireland.
Senior proposes a series of practical remedies, from the suppression of agrarian
unrest and combinations to the endowment of the Catholic Church and the extension
of the fledgling national school system. Both his analysis and his remedies are typical.
The projects of government were in some sense continuously directed towards reme-
diating Ireland’s “material and moral evils,” whether through the coercive apparatus of
the paramilitary national police force, established in 1814, or through the medium of a
national school system aimed at improving the skills and the “moral character” of the
people as a means to their economic improvement, or even through the later but
324 D. Lloyd
associated attempts to clear the “surplus” population by assisted emigration and the
regulation of the land system. For all that, the enormous excess of the population over
the available capital, and the capacity of that population to subsist and, apparently,
even to thrive, defied the logic of a political economy that required that there be a
proportion between the wage fund and the laboring population. Both the existence of
the population and its subsistence, miserable as it was, outside the laws of capitalist
economy pose a theoretical problem for political economy that is intrinsically linked to
the practical problems it poses for the disciplinary apparatuses of the state.
Confronted with the problem that such an insubordinate population represents,
political economy not only has recourse to anthropological judgments, but reveals
itself to be a mode of anthropology. Keith Tribe points out how bound political
economy is to a specific anthropology, one that desires to pose itself as universal:
Only where Man is conceived as the constitutive element of the economy—where it is the
economic action of this Man on external objects for the purpose of his preservation—can
the terms “land” and “labour” be treated as such essential constituents of economic
thought. The treatment of economics as universal and eternal thus relies on a humanism
which obliterates and naturalises the specific conditions of existence of social forms. (160)
The problem that the Irish pose to political economy is that they represent a human
society that defies the forms of subjectification it assumes to be universal; its response
is to produce a discourse of the non-human predicated on the incapacity to labor and
the requirement of what is to be an ultimately humanizing discipline. Richard Whately,
who was both the Archbishop of Dublin in the decades before the Famine and the first
Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin, elaborated at length on the
Irish in just such terms:
… it is admitted by all,—even those who estimate the most highly the good qualities which
certainly are possessed by the Irish people,—that they are improvident to a greater degree
than most others, and remarkably prone to throw aside self-dependence when they have a
promise, or a hope, of support from without. (296)
At stake for Whately, as for other economists with practical engagements, is the
problem of producing “self-dependence” in the Irish, the need, that is, to reproduce a
self-disciplined labor force with the capacity to “work by themselves,” in Althusser’s
nice phraseology. Indeed, according to Whately, “overlooking” is all the Irish need:
they possess “such abilities, and such dispositions, as require only to be rightly trained,
and developed, and directed, to make the Irish stand high among the nations of
Europe” (296n).12
But the apparent consistency of this discourse on the Irish over more than half a
century, if not down to the present, should not divert attention from its gradual
transformation or from the links between that transformation and those in the logic of
political economy itself and in its practical recommendations. In Whately’s work, to be
sure, the anthropological dimension to political economy that Tribe notes is fore-
grounded to an unusual degree, taking up the larger part of his frequently reissued
Introductory Lectures on Political Economy. For Whately, political economy is, quite
explicitly, an anthropology, being the science of that which is categorically human,
exchange: “Man might be defined, An animal that makes Exchanges…. And it is in this
point of view alone that Man is contemplated by Political Economy” (5–6). Restrictive
to the perspective of the discipline as this formulation first appears, the lectures are at
pains to make clear that the capacity or the desire to enter into exchange is a far more
general measure of the human. Exchange is both a human instinct and the providential
mechanism for a capacity that is no less categorical for humanity, “Improvement”:
A capacity for improvement seems to be characteristic of the Human Species, both as indi-
viduals and as existing in a community…. The instincts of brutes, as has often been
remarked, lead them to no improvement. But in Man, not only the faculties are susceptible
of much cultivation (a point in which he does indeed stand far above brutes, but which yet
is not peculiar to our species) but besides this, what may be called the instincts of Man lead
to the advancement of society. I mean, that (as in such cases as those just alluded to [i.e.,
the operation of corn dealers in the distribution of food] he is led to further this object
when he has another in view. And this procedure is, as far as regards then object which the
agent did not contemplate, precisely analogous, at least, to that of instinct. (93)13
Exchange is the means to a peculiarly human mode of sociality by which the very divi-
sion of labor or function is the means to improvement of the species. Adam Smith’s
secular “invisible hand” becomes, as it does in other evangelical political economists
like Trevelyan, “providential,” underwriting a system of chance effects to recuperate
the self-interested intentions of individual subjects into a larger, divinely sanctioned
scheme of civilization.
The notion of the providential takes up a semantic field that is already deeply
inscribed in the morality of political economy, that which connects provision, provi-
dence, improvement, and their contrary, that notoriously Irish quality of improvidence,
into a system of distributions which, whether understood as divinely sanctioned or not,
operates automatically to maximize wealth and disseminate the benefits of civilization.
Accordingly, the defining characteristic of civilization’s other, the “savage,” is for
Whately and his fellows, the “improvidence” that forestalls “improvement”:
The turbulent and unrestrained passions—the indolence—and, above all, the want of
forethought, which are characteristic of savages, naturally tend to prevent, and as experi-
ence seems to shew, always have prevented, that process of gradual advancement from
taking place, which was sketched out at the opening of this lecture; except when the savage
is stimulated by the example, and supported by the guidance and instruction, of men supe-
rior to himself. (110–11)
The image of the savage that Whately cites is the very picture of the Irish poor that
permeates the economic and social judgments of British observers:
The only stimulus felt by him, is that of necessity. He is impelled by hunger to hunt for
subsistence, and by cold to provide against the rigour of the seasons. When his stock of
provision is laid in, his rude clothing prepared, and his cabin constructed, he relapses into
indolence; for the wants of necessity are supplied, and the stimulus which urged him is
removed. (126)14
Indeed, as a later passage makes clear, the characteristics of the savage are not
remote geographically or historically from the civilized, but coeval with the political
economist:
326 D. Lloyd
What keeps him poor, in addition to want of skill and insecurity of property, is not a
philosophical contempt of riches, but a love of sluggish torpor and of present gratification.
The same may be said of such persons as constitute the dregs of a civilized community; they
are idle, thoughtless, improvident; but thievish. (137)
And, as Whately is at pains to make clear, the remedy for this problem, the problem of
imposing the discipline of labor and forethought on the recalcitrant “dregs” of a
contemporary population, is a combination of coercion and education. The education
provided by a coordinated set of interventions, from the Lectures themselves to his
widely disseminated school text, Lessons on Money Matters, is to be supplemented by
external influence and force.15
What Whately proposes here is at once a blueprint for and a legitimation of what
John Stuart Mill would come to call “the government of leading-strings,” that combi-
nation of hegemony and domination that will become the liberal program for imperial
rule in Ireland and elsewhere—the means to the inculcation of colonial capitalist disci-
pline until the colonized are ready to “work by themselves,” an expression that would
have had peculiar force for those concerned with the constant need to “overlook” the
half-savage Irish laborers (Mill, Considerations 396). In the backward state of the
colony, naked coercion is still required to achieve the ends that are closer to realization
in the metropolis—the successful reproduction of the political and cultural attitudes
that capitalism requires among the working classes themselves. The danger is, that
rather than that inculcation taking place, the Irish will first contaminate the more
orderly British workers with their habits. Coercion is required precisely because of the
deep and historically formed recalcitrance of the Irish to capitalist discipline, but it
must be rescripted not as the brute power of the Anglo-Irish “despots” that Young and
Malthus criticize, but as the means to incorporate the potentially assimilable colonial
population into the Empire, as a stepping stone rather than a permanent and reiterated
disciplinary requirement.
Accordingly the apparent convergence between Whately and Mill is deceptive, mask-
ing a decisive shift in the moral logic and the social narrative of political economy as an
instrument of rule. For Whately, as an Anglican apologist for political economy as much
as he is its most orthodox popularizer, savagery is the result of a degeneration of portions
of the human race. Since all improvement must come from an external stimulus, as he
argues, the process of improvement that leads to civilization can only have been initiated
by an act of divine revelation. Savagery then represents humanity in a state degenerated
from that revelation and is thus in need of the secondary stimulus that the civilized
“superior” affords (112–13). This narrative of divine providence and degeneracy is far
from the secular anthropology of historical development that emerges through Mill’s
repeated attempts to come to terms with the problems posed by Irish conditions. Mill’s
position, rather than regarding the Irish as degenerate, recapitulates earlier ethno-
graphic descriptions that deciphered in the “Irish character” the features of a people still
stuck in feudalism and extends them into a narrative of economic development with
universal bearing.16 What Mill introduces is the notion that in some sense the Irish char-
acter is the product not so much of their stagnation as of a deviation in the course of
their development induced and reproduced by the colonial institution of cottierism:
That system is found only where the habitual requirements of the rural labourers are the
lowest possible; where as long as they are not actually starving, they will multiply; and
population is only checked by the diseases, and the shortness of life, consequent on
insufficiency of merely physical necessaries. This was the state of the largest portion of the
Irish peasantry. When a people have sunk into this state, and still more when they have
been in it from time immemorial, the cottier system is an almost insuperable obstacle to
their emerging from it. (Principles 317)
Insuperable obstacle it is, because cottierism can furnish no incentive to sustained labor:
Almost alone among mankind the cottier is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either
better or worse off by any act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his
landlord would gain; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his landlord’s expense. A situation
more devoid of motives to either labour or self-command, imagination itself cannot
conceive. The inducements of free human beings are taken away, and those of a slave not
substituted. (Principles 318–19)
The Irish cottier is at once the antithesis of the free subject and of the slave, lacking the
former’s self-motivation and the latter’s external discipline. Mill’s solution, which he
begins to develop in his Morning Chronicle editorials during the Famine itself, is the
introduction of peasant proprietorship. It is a measure deliberately opposed to the
English capitalist model of the “small proprietor” recommended by orthodox political
economists like Senior and Trevelyan, a model that would be, as Mill remarks,
“another word for the clearing system” (Mill 10). The introduction of English models
of farming would require subjecting the remaining cottiers, now transformed as per
prescription into day laborers, to continuous coercive discipline to overcome their
habits of indolence—a form of external “guidance” that is of course by no means
abhorrent to capitalism.
Mill’s counter-proposal, though it eschews such raw discipline just as it abhors the
violent injustice of eviction and forced emigration, nonetheless has a familiar end in
view, the “moral improvement” of the Irish poor. The establishment of a peasant
proprietary would set to work the “magic power” of property:
Here is the secret for converting an indolent and reckless into a laborious, provident, and
careful people. It is a secret which never fails. All over Europe, the untiring labourer, the
peasant whose industry and vigilance never sleep, is he who owns the land he tills. (Mill 14)
Where Trevelyan argues in “The Irish Crisis” that a peasant proprietorship would be of
no value to those unused to sustained labor and lacking “the wholesome moral quali-
ties required to turn this advantage to good account,” Mill argues precisely the reverse:
Those who, knowing neither Ireland nor any foreign country, take as their sole standard of
social and economic excellence English practice, propose as the single remedy for Irish
wretchedness, the transformation of the cottiers into hired labourers. But this is rather a
scheme for the improvement of Irish agriculture, than of the condition of the Irish people.
The status of a day-labourer has no charm for infusing forethought, frugality, or self-
restraint, into a people devoid of them. If the Irish peasantry could be universally changed
into receivers of wages, the old habits and mental characteristics of the people remaining,
we should merely see four or five millions of people living as day-labourers in the same
wretched manner in which as cottiers they lived before; equally passive in the absence of
every comfort, equally reckless in multiplication, and even, perhaps, equally listless at their
328 D. Lloyd
work; since they could not be dismissed in a body, and if they could, dismissal would now
be simply remanding them to the poor rate. Far other would be the effect of making them
peasant proprietors. A people who in industry and providence have everything to learn—
and who are confessedly among the most backward of European populations in the indus-
trial virtues—require for their regeneration the most powerful incitements by which those
virtues can be stimulated: and there is no stimulus as yet comparable to property in land.
(Principles 326–27)
A “permanent interest in the soil” is for Mill the alchemy that will transform the Irish
character and unite, in Senior’s terms, material and moral conditions in the direction
of permanent improvement:
It [fixity of tenure] gives to the cultivator a permanent interest in the soil. In doing this it
combines the greatest economical and the greatest moral good of which Ireland in its
present condition is susceptible. And these two things are inseparable; both must be
provided for by any plan of improvement deserving the name. Without the moral change,
the greatest economical improvement will last no longer than a prodigal’s bounty; without
the economical change, the moral improvement will not be attained at all. (Mill 23–24)
Though Mill’s arguments sustain a polemic against the anglocentrism of proposals

for imposing English models on Ireland, as indeed on India, it is important not to
mistake his understanding of the value of peasant proprietorship for radical economic
relativism or for a thoroughgoing alternative to English capitalism. It is neither relativ-
ism nor an alternative because ultimately it aims at the “moral improvement” of the
Irish by way of their reinscription into the normative history of economic and social
development. It is the Irish economist, Mill’s disciple, J.E. Cairnes who spells out, more
explicitly than his teacher, the developmental status and function of peasant propri-
etorship: “It would seem that, in the progress of nations from barbarism to civilization,
there is a point at which the bulk of the people pass naturally into the peasant proprietor
condition” (Political 151–52). Cairnes continues:
To give one example more, English history illustrates the same tendency to peasant propri-
etorship at a certain stage of the nation’s growth, and not less decisively the social value of
that economy. The period when it had attained its greatest development in England seems
to have been about the end of the fifteenth century, by which time the condition of the
villeinage had very generally passed into that of copyhold tenure, while that tendency to a
consolidation of estates and holdings which marked the epoch of Elizabeth had not yet
commenced….
Now, into this phase of industrial existence the Irish people have never passed. The fact, as
it seems to me, is one intimately connected with their present condition and character.
(Political 153–54)
Peasant proprietorship, as Cairnes conceives it more openly than Mill, is a kind of

mechanism for the production of individuality, from the “joint ownership” of what
was becoming recognized as the “primitive communism” of tribal societies to “a
process of ‘gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals from the
blended rights of a community.’”17
We can see clearly here how the large opposition between the “degenerate savage”
and “civilized Man” that Whately mobilized gives way in a matter of decades to a
developmental historicism which allows for policy interventions that are deliberately
designed to replicate the movements of a secular historical process that substitutes for
providential design. This historicism folds together material conditions and moral
character in a narrative of the emergence of the self-dependent possessive individual
and in doing so aligns the legitimation of an hegemonic colonialism with the logic of
history itself. As a history of transitions between states or conditions, it is entirely
adapted to negotiate the “transitional moment” in British colonialism that the Famine
marked. The characteristics that make the Irish recalcitrant to capital can be seen not
as permanent racial traits, but as “developmental” effects, and the policy now proposed
takes into account differences of culture that are susceptible to intervention and
transformation rather than sheer coercion and extirpation. Hence Cairnes’s lengthy
demonstration of the effect of education in achieving voluntary emigration from
Ireland as opposed to the abhorrent methods of compulsory clearance: the reduction
of the Irish cottier population remains the aim of the liberal economist, but the means
used to attain it have changed (Political 146–49). Continuing emigration is no longer
the effect of bad government or even clearance, but of good government following the
bad and of “the sudden disruption of mediaeval barbarism by the grandest forces of
modern civilization” (Political 151).
Cairnes’s argument about emigration, of course, depends on marginalizing the
continuing prevalence of eviction and dispossession that would lead to the Land Wars
of the 1880s just as it underestimates the effect of large, existing communities of
emigrant populations settled outside Ireland since the Famine in encouraging further
departures. More importantly, however, neither his nor Mill’s arguments can do
without the persistence of racial judgments that are still functional rather than merely
residual. For Cairnes, that takes the form of implicitly retaining the assumption that in
this transitional moment in “the progress of nations from barbarism to civilization,”
the Irish have yet to fully enter civilization: “their present conditions and character,”
mutually reinforcing, remain half-barbaric and more analogous to those of India than
of neighboring England.18 Mill, as we have seen, was no less persuaded by the analogy
with India, and insistent on a historicist view of Irish development, but through his
writings the question of the racialization of the Irish is both more explicit and more
vexed. His position is at moments polemically, even angrily antagonistic to racist
representations of the condition and character of the Irish:
Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are formed on the most
important problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest
pretension, imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy in the
Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance of the
Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social
and moral influences of the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the
diversity of conduct and character to inherent natural differences. What race would not be
indolent and insouciant when things are so arranged, that they derive no advantage from
forethought or exertion? (Principles 319)
Mill’s rebuttal of a Carlylean anti-Irish racism here, as in his more or less contemporary
attack on Carlyle’s “The Nigger Question,” is forceful. And yet, within less than a page,
330 D. Lloyd
Mill produces a more benevolent but nonetheless patronizing and, in the long run,
more perdurable stereotype:
It is very natural that a pleasure-loving and sensitively organized people like the Irish,
should be less addicted to steady routine labour than the English, because life has more
excitements for them independent of it; but they are not less fitted for it than their Celtic
brethren the French, nor less so than the Tuscans, or the ancient Greeks. An excitable
nature is precisely that in which, by adequate inducements, it is easiest to kindle a spirit of
animated exertion. (Principles 319)
Mill deploys similar judgements in his Morning Chronicle editorials as a means to

oppose plans for Irish emigration to the United States, an enterprise for which, he
thinks, they are unsuited by racial character. Unlike the resourceful and self-reliant
Scots and British, the Irish lack the independence necessary of the “backwoodsman”:
The Irishman is the opposite of all this. Sympathy and fellowship are indispensable to him.
Instead of insisting, John-Bull-like, upon owing everything to himself, the demand of his
nature is to be led and governed. He prefers to have someone to lean upon. He has energy
and self-will in abundance, because he has strong desires, but it must be in the line of his
previous habits and inclinations. He will never emerge from old habits by his own innate
force; but he may be guided and persuaded out of them…. (Mill 30–31)
The terms here are not far from Whately’s dissertation on the savage and certainly
anticipate those of Matthew Arnold and others for whom the sentimental disposition
of the Celts predisposed them to anarchical and turbulent tendencies that required the
discipline of Anglo-Saxon government.19
The pattern that Mary Poovey has noted in James Kay, the simultaneous tendencies
to domesticate and obscure Irish difference or to distance them into radical alterity,
recurs in the new dispensation of political economy. (Poovey 71). In the case of
the Irish, there is an insistent pattern by which the catachrestic affirmation of the
stereotype—the same, but not quite—is maintained in relation to its reverse—other,
but not quite (Bhabha 89–90).20 Even in the historicist form of the stereotypes of Irish
otherness, that reversible, specular oscillation is maintained in the dual form: the same
but not yet; belated but coeval. In this complex of proximity and alterity, anteriority
and contemporaneity, the Irish remain a troublingly inassimilable specter even for the
most assured liberal historicism. Evidently, the proximity of the Irish is in the first
place geographical—not only is Irish poverty massed a mere day’s travel across the
Irish Sea from the imperial capital, the migrant Irish already constitute, according to
McCulloch, “from a fourth to a third part” of Britain’s urban population. That
geographical proximity and the consequent intermingling of Irish, Scottish, and
English bodies and cultural practices (interestingly, the Welsh are never mentioned)
undermines the possibility of removal in space figuring the removal in time that Irish
“savagery” or “barbarism” are read as. On the contrary, and unlike that of other
colonial nations at the time, Ireland’s coevality with the metropolis is a constant and
persistent presence, both spatial and temporal.
As the presence of another time in the present, the Irish represent a problematic
instance for political economy in its insistence on the relationship between its laws and
“human improvement,” between the development of capitalism and the inexorable
advance of civilization. In a peculiar sense, the Irish represent the simultaneity of
rather than the historical lag between different moments of social formation; more
precisely, they represent the interpenetration of the most advanced capitalism with
those other and recalcitrant formations that continually emerge at the interface of the
modern and the non-modern, as its incommensurable by-products rather than its pre-
history.21 Cairnes comes close to observing this, but the implications of his astute
insight are masked from him. “Cottierism,” he argues, is “a specific and almost unique
product of Irish industrial life.” The product not of a normative path of historical and
economic development, cottierism is rather the effect of the “violent arrest” of that
development and its torquing onto a singular track, the anomalous mix of serfdom
with capitalist conditions of competition and contract, “serfdom reduced to a money
standard”:
Modes of action which are only suitable, which are only tolerable, in an advanced indus-
trial civilization, where the actors stand on independent grounds and exercise a real
choice, and where moreover an effective public opinion exists to control extravagant
pretensions, were suddenly introduced and rigorously applied amongst a people just
emerging from the nomad state. In the lowest deep there was thus found a lower deep; and
Irish serfdom merged in the more desperate status of the Irish cottier. (Political 159, 166,
163–4)
What Cairnes is unable to perceive, however, in this anomalous mix, is the grounds for
an alternative conception of historical process, one that gains powerful force in later
Irish writing.22 For all the brief allusion to Milton’s Satan,23 it is precisely the challeng-
ing, oppositional force embedded in that anomaly that both political economy, in
theory, and the imperial police, in practice, must resist. The incommensurability of the
social forms that emerged out of Irish “nomadism” with those of industrial capitalism,
with its ostensibly strict separation of the spheres of the market and of “public
opinion,” is an anomaly that can be cured only by the governmental intervention of
modern institutions directed at transforming the habits of the cottier to accord with the
prescribed path of the developmental historicism that has reformulated the terms of
political economy.
The Irish in the meantime appear both within and without the system of British
capital. From one perspective, the labor that is reproduced in and by the potato econ-
omy is not equivalent to capitalist labor in general. It is inconvertible, literally failing to
enter the exchanges of the money economy, and its rhythms and practices—epito-
mized for Trevelyan in the “lazy bed” in which the potato was planted—encourage
indolence rather than capitalist discipline.24 From this perspective, Ireland is marginal
to capitalism, a country and an economy yet to be developed and subject to coercive
intervention to draw it into the larger industrial economy of Britain and the world. It
is, simply, spatially peripheral as it is temporally backward. Its prodigious surplus
population is a waste matter that flows through the economy, generated by the scan-
dalous abundance of the potato, infecting all with its contagion as it circulates disorder
and potentially disaffection among the British working class.
Yet it is this very circulation of the Irish, enabled by their contiguity with Britain, that
sets in play a contrary movement in which the Irish appear as all too mobile within and
332 D. Lloyd
all too contemporary with British capitalism whose logic they infect precisely because
of their uncanny resemblances. Apparently incapable of using money, of engaging in
abstraction or exchange, they circulate nonetheless like money itself, or like an
abundance of cheap goods whose surplus—like the surplus of labor that the Irish
indeed are—floods the market and degrades its values. They are the mobile counterpart
of the money that has been racked from them in the form of rent, that displaces them
from the land that has been expropriated from them in the violence of primitive
accumulation. The refuse of the system, the dung that must be set aside in discrete
invisibility, they return at once as specters of a primitive accumulation that haunts the
extraction of surplus value and as the figures of “filthy lucre” itself, of the age-old asso-
ciation between dung and money. The paradoxical embodiment of the disembodied,
the insistence of the non-modern in the modern, these figures of “degradation and
disorder” circulate through English writings from Malthus to Kay and from Kay to
Carlyle and McCulloch, and even to Engels and Marx. In a peculiar way, their
circulation knits together the modern discourse of the social, left to right, in a common
desire to discipline this wild counterpart of the capitalist economy.25 Theoretical and
governmental discourses are at one in the need to contain the Irish, to civilize and
modernize them, to harness their energies for either capitalist or revolutionary
projects, and it is this anxiety as to the circulation of bodies that a vigorous capitalism
unleashes, as much as the question of the rationalization of Irish agriculture, that
obliges the transformation of political economy into an historicist discipline that can
fix a place for Ireland in its developmental schema.
Notes
[1] Kevin Whelan provides a valuable summary essay on both the historical emergence of the
1.
cottier system and on its ecological and agricultural adaptations and innovations.
[2] The most extensive demonstration of the policy-making role of British political economists
2.
with regard to Ireland is R. D. Collison Black.

[3] Scott’s emphasis.
3.
[4] The causes of the Famine and the responsibility of British administration for its enormous
4.
mortality have been more thoroughly explored in the last fifteen years than at any previous
time. See especially Kinealy (349–59) and Gray (331–33). The findings of such studies to some
extent contradict the orthodoxy of so-called “revisionist history” in Ireland, which has gener-
ally sought to diminish administrative responsibility and attributed harsher assessments of the
ideological and religious discourses that contributed to policy, as well as of the policies them-
selves, to nationalist propagandizing. For a useful summary of the revisionist position
(initially written before the upsurge of research in the 1990s), see James S. Donnelly, Jr.
(Chapter 9).
[5] It should be noted that “corn” at this time was the generic term for grain and referred princi-
5.
pally to wheat rather than to maize, the “Indian corn” or “yellow meal” that became so noto-
rious during the Famine as “Peel’s brimstone” (Trevelyan 249), due to unfamiliarity with its
modes of preparation.
[6] See Cormac Ó Gráda (Black 25–26). Ó Gráda elsewhere discusses at length Joel Mokyr’s cele-
6.
brated critique in Why Ireland Starved of Malthusian accounts of the Famine and emphasizes
the extent to which more recent scholarship confirms that the Famine was more unpredict-
able than inevitable. See Ireland (188–89).
[7] Malthus’s emphases. Though Malthus’s prognosis regarding tendencies has been borne out by
7.
more recent demographers, Newenham’s projection for the population of Ireland in 1837
seems remarkably close to actual figures, given the figure of 8.1 million given in the British
census of 1841.
[8] Smith’s allusion to rice is interesting here. As we shall see, the potato becomes blamed for
8.
Ireland’s prodigious rate of reproduction, for the excess of labor that therefore undercuts
English wages rates, and for sustaining a servile culture anathematic to Anglo-Saxon virtues.
Virtually the same stereotypes will circulate around rice as the staple of “Asiatic” labor in late-
nineteenth-century North America. See, for example, Takaki (Chapter 10).
[9] Trevelyan, in his zeal, goes so far as to deny what most contemporaries accepted, the nutri-
9.
tional benefits of the potato for all its occasional failures, and attributes the Irish incapacity to
“endure continuous labour” to this diet (318–19n).
[10] On the genealogy of the discourse of development economics, see Escobar (Chapter 1). My
10.
argument would, however, date the emergence of that discourse to a much earlier date than
Escobar does.
[11] See especially Ó Gráda; Kinealy; and Gray.

11.
[12] See also Althusser (181).

12.
[13] Whately’s remarks here, while aimed at a naturalization of political economy’s notion of the
13.
human, nonetheless lead one to observe that it is political economy, rather than psychoanaly-
sis, that initiates a notion of the unconscious, one which operates above and beyond the indi-
vidual’s intentionality as the real operates for Lacan according to the laws of Aristotle’s tuche,
or chance effect. See Lacan (52–56).
[14] Whately is here, as often in the Lectures, citing Bishop Sumner’s Records of the Creation.
14.
[15] Whateley’s Lessons on Money Matters, elementary lessons in political economy, aimed initially
15.
at Irish working class children, eventually became a widely used school text throughout the
Empire: “originally in Reading-books of Irish National Schools (now in the hands of several
hundred thousand children in various parts of the Empire), and also in the Saturday Magazine;
from which they were reprinted in a separate little volume, of which about 17,000 have been
sold; besides a reprint in the United States, and a French translation extensively circulated in
Belgium and in France,” as its author boasts (186n).
[16] On this tradition of ethnography on Ireland, which was only beginning to differentiate itself
16.
from folkloric research and travel writing, and its relation to the Famine, see Lloyd
(“Memory”).
[17] Political (154–55). Cairnes is here citing Henry J. S. Maine’s Ancient Law.
17.
[18] Political (154); “Political Economy” (206).

18.
[19] For a discussion of Matthew Arnold’s influential association of the Celt and sentimentality,
19.
turbulence, and need of government, see Lloyd, Nationalism (6–13).

[20] The importance of metonymy, the trope of contiguity, is of course crucial to the ambiguous
20.
place of the Irish in nineteenth-century social commentary.

[21] I have elaborated the theoretical concept of the interface between the modern and the non-
21.
modern in Ireland after History (45–46); on the distinction between non-modern formations
and capitalism’s “pre-history,” see Chakrabarty.
[22] For one version of a thinking about Irish history and culture that draws on this notion of the
22.
coevality of different time frames, see Lloyd (“Rethinking”).

[23] The allusion in “in the lowest deep a Lower deep” is to Satan’s despair on overlooking Eden in
23.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, l. 76. It might be said, after Blake, that unlike Milton or
Cairnes, the Irish are always of the devil’s party.
[24] Whelan points out that the “lazy bed” was in fact an ingenious solution to the problems of
24.
maximizing the crop of the potato under the environmental conditions of western Ireland
(22).
[25] For a fuller discussion of the figurative and rhetorical, as well as the political, instability that
25.
the Irish came to represent to nineteenth-century social theorists, see Lloyd (“Mobile”).
334 D. Lloyd
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Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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The Political Economy of the Potato

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The Political Economy of the Potato

ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2007 Taylor & Francis

Those terms, “character,” “condition,” “improvement,” define precisely the parame-

Already the “prodigious” and “astonishing” increase in population appears as an

In this acknowledgement, the notion of a universally identical “race of labourers”

substituted. (Principles 318–19)

Though Mill’s arguments sustain a polemic against the anglocentrism of proposals

Peasant proprietorship, as Cairnes conceives it more openly than Mill, is a kind of

Mill deploys similar judgements in his Morning Chronicle editorials as a means to

with regard to Ireland is R. D. Collison Black.

[11] See especially Ó Gráda; Kinealy; and Gray.

[12] See also Althusser (181).

[18] Political (154); “Political Economy” (206).

turbulence, and need of government, see Lloyd, Nationalism (6–13).

place of the Irish in nineteenth-century social commentary.

coevality of different time frames, see Lloyd (“Rethinking”).

Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. 63–71.

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