Part One: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland

I have a lot of feelings about Ireland, Like like, I feel like Ireland probably got the greatest slang in the whole wide world. Concredible slang, you know, like y'all just y'all just hate everybody, you know. I like the pissiness. I like that you don't take irreverence, you don't take nothing serious, you know. Yeah, it's the yeah, you know, when you're doing a contest of like islands where a lot of bad things have been done to them. Um,

there's a lot of competition, you know. But but but boy, Ireland really up up up in the let's say, the top quarter of that pack. They're pretty up there, especially because like they they wouldn't drafted into white people until much later. You know, it did take get to be white too, Like that's cold, that's cold as ice, you know, saying like we'd the northern part of the same island and we can't get to be white people. You know what I'm saying. It's it's it's quite a quite a tale. Um. Now,

how do you feel about the English? Well, I will say this, they have a track record of just shipping on the rest of the earth for just the most efficient just with the greatest efficiency. Like I'm never like, I don't know how that little island was able to shoot on the whole earth as they It'd be fair to say they're like the New England Patriots of nations.

It really is just the Tom Brady of country. Just can't lose, I will say, though, you know, yes, I am in the in the midst of finishing, uh top boy. So as of right now, I'm like East London, isn't it, you know what I'm saying, like selling the food. So right now I'm like, now, granted, I will say this, I've noticed what made London cool is what made everything else cool, which is the presence of black people, because why Top Boy is so dope, it's the Jamaican immigrants

that like created this whole type of slaying. It's calm, bro, It's that. Yeah, Don'tason, I'm joining is because I'm just like, hey, black people make everything cool. That's It's a big part of why London Calling is such a good album. Um. Now prop today. First off, I'm glad you've been scoping that because we're really going to need to lean on the English accents here for comedy relief, because yeah, yeah, we're gonna have to do a lot of that. I've

been practicing my my posh, so we'll give that a shot. Um. We're talking today about the thing that is most commonly called the potato famine. UM. One thing that Irish people will point out is that there was no such thing as a potato famine. Um. And the argument that will make is that, like, well, there was a potato blight, but Ireland had plenty of food. The famine was entirely caused, but there it was. It was a famine caused by

English people, right. It was a famine caused by the the the the ruling class of the British Empire was not a famine caused by a potato bug and that is accurate. Um, yeah, yeah it is. Yeah. No, No, they don't leave it to the Brits to like do a genocide and blame it on a vegetable. Hey, listen, y'all, I'll try to tell you we was just doing mine in our own business and then the potato decided to die. Yeah what what what? What? What do you want us to do? The potato made the call like it's calming

all that it is. It is. There's a lot of different takes you see from empires that commit genocides. You know, Turkey just decided to pretend that nothing bad ever happened to Armenian people. Uh. The Germans seemed broadly to have embraced that they did some bad things. But yeah, they're down there at least say, okay, guys, the British pointing to produce in the grocery store and being like, no,

that's what you gotta be angry at. Um. I don't know if you have a dated somebody who was just ferociously never wrong, like would say stuff, that's like there's being right and then there's being less right. And I think in this situation, I'm just less right. Yeah, that's that's that's that's that's England again. Yeah, that's that's that's the old that's that's old john Bull Um, which is the thing that people used to call England. Um. So

have you ever have you ever been to Ireland? Prop? No, man, It's it's on my bucket list. I've been there a bunch. I love. I love going to Ireland, particularly I really like Dublin. And if you if you go to Dublin, which is a beautiful town, um always pretty great too. I like, there's a lot of great places in Ireland.

But if you go to Dublin UM and you head to Custom House K you will see a series of statues and they're kind of There's like this street, you know, with a sidewalk next to it, and there's a bunch of statues of like wraith like human beings marching along this this little chunk of sidewalk. There's a one of them has a mother clutching a diving, dying baby to a breast. The other is like carrying either just like a past or the corpse of a starved child over

her shoulders and it's it's it sounds terrible. It's the famine memorial, and it's a really really affecting memorial, and it's just kind of like in the middle of things, you know, um, and there It's one of those one of the reasons I really appreciate that memorials. If you do spend a lot of time, as I have, in parts of the world where you come across like starving

people and refugees. It's some whoever made the memorial new I knew what they were doing, and I think there was like a conscious attempt to uh like there was an understanding of like how that looks. It's it's pretty affecting. Um. So that's what we're going to talk about today, and

it was yeah, yeah, the not a potato famine. Um. And it is interesting that these and I think what's sound kind of so compelling about this to me is that like all of the people who died and the thing we're about to talk about, um, this this was I think it's fair to say an act of genocide. That's certainly something that like one of our main sources today of Tim pat Coogan, will claim, but it was

not a genocide. That kind of Usually when you have something like this, it comes as the result of like a civil war or at least a bloody conflict of some there's some sort of like fight, um, and then there is kind of an ethnic cleansing or a killing. UM. That's not really the case with the Great Hunger. Um. It's it's more a genocide that's kind of the result of pure venal greed and free market ideology taken to the status of a religion. Um. And it's it's it's

quite a tale. We're going to discuss the death toll a little bit later. For now, I'm just going to point out that the pre famine population of Ireland was a little bit less than nine million people. UM. Today there are just north of five million people in Ireland. UM. And in fact, last year is when Ireland first reached five million in population since the famine. UM it is probably yeah, it's probably the only nation on earth to

have fewer people today than it did in the eighteen forties. UM. Wow, Yeah, man's is proper wicked. Brov that the peace for the food. I'm I'm I'm sorry, like I'm really deep into top boy right now. That's that's that's fine. I'm I'm very deep into I'm still gearing up to to try out my my English accent. We we we dusted it off for one of the Kissinger episodes and you you were going off in we were going off a little bit.

We were trying to do that, like and so yeah, the thing about my like, I know it's bad, but the best part about like how to do this one is because it's part Jamaican, So you can kind of like if you lean to Pat Swa, it's like it's okay because they're Jamaican immigrants, you know what I'm saying, So like that's my only out. But at the same time, bro, it's calm, bro, like it's not good. I know it's not good. You know. The best I can do is well, I don't see why we have to have people who

aren't English on the planet. It doesn't seem really particularly feasible. But both hand Hannah in apology apologize, I mean yes, at the same time for a number of this is great, though I do apologize ahead of time anytime I do a British accent to Jake, Um, my greatest, my good, my, my posh. My post British is give them the old what Fall. There we go nailing it, but the old

what Fall. I will say this though I know this after touring through the UK enough, like doing music, like I finally figured out like that there and of course does that. There's like regional accents, so like I get it now when you're like in Birmingham, they do the Birmingham like they got that that that thing. Well, I think what we can certainly say is that we will be getting revenge for all of England's crimes by doing a variety of bad Yeah. Yeah, you was able to

conquer the world. The least you can do is have to tolerate. Yeah, you're gonna get angry when I mispronounced Northampton or whatever. Um. So to explain how all of this happened, um, how like so many people were killed, um or we're allowed to die, We're gonna have to go back in history quite a bit to the very birth of the British Empire um, because in a lot of ways, Ireland was kind of the first colonial possession of the Empire. UM. Now, prior to English conquest of Ireland, UM,

the island maintained a history of pretty ferocious independence. It was never even close to being colonized by the Romans. They kind of like stop at at Scotland more or less, like they're trying to get up north, but they build that wall like it's a mess, you know, trying to trying to get up that far as you might know. Yeah, England not super close to Rome. Uh, Ireland, it's already

far just far enough, you know. So you know, the Ireland pretty pretty much doing its own thing for that period of time, and then in like ten sixties six you get the Normans, which are kind of like basically the French conquer England um. And then after that point, you know the English kings or Norman kings, right, so

not that long after the Norman's conquered England. In Ireland, there's this guy, Brian Beru, who is a high king and he the Normans try to invade Ireland and he defeats their armies and throws them back um or at least that's kind of how history is often summarized. The reality is a lot more complex. But you know this is not that in depth of an Irish history podcast. So like most parts of medieval Europe, Ireland, you know,

you've got a bunch of little kingdoms. You've got a bunch of like different kings, and they're all at war with each other pretty often, like most places in the world. Um, you got a bunch of people who are fighting with each other all the time. Um. And so while the Normans are in charge in England, there's this Irish king named Jarmide and mcmurra um and he he gets into a little bit of a scrap with some of his neighbors. So he kind of accidentally on purpose kidnaps the wife

of one of his rivals. Um and that doesn't go great for him, So he he winds up in fighting the Normans to Ireland to help him deal with this little squabble. Um, which will prove to have been a mistake. You don't invite the eye number one. Yeah, So all this is happening, and like the mid eleven hundreds, right this, this Irish king is like, hey, Norman's come on over, help me out. I kidnapped a lady and it didn't

go great for me. Um. And and when the Normans get invited over to Ireland, there's a pope, right, you know, popes are a big deal. In the eleven hundreds, there's not really like that's kind of the only game in town unless you're going orthodox, right, Like, if you're a Christian, it's it's pretty much the popes or nothing. Um. And the pope at this time was a guy named Adrian and he's actually the only english person they've ever let

be pope. Um, which might key you went on how bad an idea it was to let an English person be the Yeah, this is the last time they try that. Ship they bring us, they bring a Nazi and to be pope before they let another British person. I'm like, and they got they got a pretty spicy track record for him to be like, I don't know about you know,

that didn't work out at all. Um. So Adrian, uh, this English pope he uh, the Norman's kind of come to him and they're like, they work out a deal, and so he gives the King of England at this point, Henry the Second a papal bull, which is like, you know, a pope uh announcement law type deally right, when the pope declares the thing that's a papal bull kind of Um, my Catholic audience is screening at me for inaccurately describing what a papal bull is. But whatever he issues, this

papal bull that legitimizes their invasion of the Ireland. Um. And so there's this basically what it what has happened here is the English Crown have made a deal with the papacy to colonize Ireland, which is seen as wild

and still pretty pagan. Um. So that's that that that's what happens at this point when the Normans get invited over, they make this deal with the Pope to to christianize the pagan Irish um and to discuss what comes back for a good practice for the America's, for the America's for I mean, that's one of the points that like there's a pretty good book called The Invention of the

White Race that goes into this some more detail. But like most of the techniques that the British Empire would use in places in Southeast Asia and Africa in in the America's, we're kind of tested out in Ireland, right in the Ireland. Yeah, um. And for what comes next year. I'm going to read a quote by Irish scholar Tim

pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot. From the Vatican's point of view, the attraction of this arrangement lay in the fact that Rome would exert its authority through the appointment of hand picked bishops, rather than having to struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish abbots, who hitherto had often been appointed by the families who controlled the extensive church lands and monasteries. The attraction for the

Normans was straightforward. It gave them access to Irish Land, which, with their advances and agriculture, they were able to exploit far more profitably than where the cattle hurting Irish, and so Christ and Caesar came to be hand in glove. Unfortunately, when Henry the eighth defied the Pope by divorcing his wife to marry Anne Boleyn, the gloves came off between King and Pope, with disastrous results for the Irish. From the time of Henry the Eighth's breaking with Rome, England

became a Protestant nation and Ireland remained a Catholic one. Thus, apart from the inevitable attempts by a large country to subordinate a smaller country, England's religious wars became superimposed on Ireland. Also, not alone would the Catholic Irish lose their lands, they would also be forced to pay for the upkeep of

the Protestant clergy. Not surprisingly, in a land where the poet is both feared and revered, Native Irish resentment at the superimposition of Protestantism found its expression, and a bitter verse by Rafferty, the famous blind Irish poet, don't talk of your Protestant minister or his church without temple or state, for the foundation stone of his religion was the bollox of Henry the Eighth. Well, pretty good little poem. That's

good that I would love to see. Like, man, I wish there was like an alternate, like sort of multiverse timeline where the Irish just rejected the idea of joining whiteness. It's just if they're just like you know what, man, nah, fam nah, you know what I'm saying, Like, I just

wonder like where we would be at now. Obviously our understanding of race being so intermixed with like colorism and stuff like that, But what if the influence was just like buck y'all, nah, we ain't one of you, I'm saying, because of ship like this, where it's like not only did y'all try to colonize us, you even tried to like, I mean, y'all sprayes off faith on us to you know what I'm saying, which was like and then you were like actually yeah yeah, it's like first of all,

like yeah, just you a subversion of our all fair you act like you invented something, you know what I'm saying. So like man ed have been. I would have loved to have seen some sort of like alternate time line where Irish were just like black people, like we were just like well, and there's I mean there's a lot

that like because one of the things that happens. You know, you've got Aliver Cromwell who invades Ireland, and like if you look at the Irish countryside, one thing you might notice is that like there's weirdly not a lot of like old growth forests or wild animals because they got murdered, like like Cromwell like kills the land to a significant extent.

It's like pretty there's a lot of like horrible, terrible, fucked up war crimes that go on in this period um and a lot of it's seen as like I said a little earlier that like there was this attitude of like there's a lot of like pagan wildness in Ireland. That doesn't mean that like Christianity isn't there, right, the Normans of the Catholicture don't bring Christianity to Ireland. It's

been there for quite a while. But there's also this attitude that like, um, there's something kind of like feral about the Irish people. You see that a lot in kind of the way in which these people write about Ireland in this time. Um, and there is I think an extent like again, a lot has been written and that's not really not the focus of this episode, and like how the Irish became white? And I'm fairly certain

there's actually a book by that title. Um, yeah, But I learned a lot of that in like my like undergrad studies, like that the process of like disenfranchising slaves and like when the it's good stuff and like Shea's Rebellion and all this stuff that like kind of tied to whiteness at least in the America's Yeah, but it is important, like a lot of that does happen in the Americas because when you actually look in Ireland, there is as much as there's histories of other things, there

is a significant history of like rejection of aspects of that identity, and you see little signs of that and a bunch of things, including the fact that if you go to like a football game in Ireland day, there's a decent chance you go to see a lot of Palestinian flags. There's a long history of like kind of

solidarity and whatnot that comes with being a colonized people. Um, that's not the only thing, because also it's worth noting that as with like the Scots, shipload of the soldiers of the British Empire who were doing this whole making an empire thing are Irish people too. So it's it's a bunch of stuff is happening. Um. So English domination of Ireland was not a clean process that didn't happen all at once. This is going on for a period of kind of centuries. It's being sort of ironed out.

As a rule. Irish lords ruled most of the land in Ireland through the twelve hundreds to the early like sixteen hundreds. Um. And you know it's the stuff we've been talking about. There's fighting in between these different lords, there's alliances. Some of them are like backing the English

to like funck over their neighbors. Pretty normal feudalism stuff. Um. Celtic Ireland, as it's generally called, was divided between four or five lords at any given time the bulk of the land um, and they distributed like the land that was under their control to lower chiefs into like accepts the in in what we're called land usages and in exchange for this land. Basically again, it's the pretty normal

feudalism deal. You've got a hand over a portion of your agricultural produced for the lord, and if there's a war, you've got to like help, you know, give him bodies. Basically standard. Yeah, you've got these guys and they got there, they got their guys. Um. It's it's pretty normal, pretty normal feudalism stuff, which is not all that different from organized crime, but with better outfits. Um yeah, like most government. Um. So, Henry the Eighth becomes king as we discussed, and he

kind of staggers dick first into the history of religion. Um, that's crazy, Like there was a way I would love to be there for the Henry the Eighth story that well, maybe we'll get to that at one point. That's a little further back than we usually do. All probably Cromwell. Probably do Cromwell before we do Henry, because I mean

Cromwell's after. But you know, yeah, I'm just like, listen, if there's any like sort of if you are, if you are a Christian or Protestant in any way, shape or form like you there's no in I don't care what schout theology is, your hat has to go off to him to eight. It's an incredible flex like in that completely, that's amazing. He got to start a denomination just because because because he needed the pool Namby, he invented the what is it the Anglican Hirian? Yeah, because

they wanted to fuck differently this look in respect? Do I like, there's the human humans sit out theology down for a second? Respect due bro, Yeah, it's it's it's pretty, it's pretty. It's pretty cool. So one of the things that Henry the Eighth does because he's he's he's not happy that the Irish aren't willing to give up their religion because he wanted to fuck um. And there's other stuff like there's a lot of like Irish raids on the English coast. There's kind of fighting with in Ireland.

So anyway, he decides Ireland has been a troublesome food quite enough time, and and he makes a declaration that all Irish lands, whether they're owned by Gaelic, Irish or English transplants, have to descender, have to surrender their their land to the Crown, and then the Crown's going to give them back. Right. So what he's doing, he's not actually trying to take their land away, but he's trying to make it clear that everyone who owns land in

Ireland owns it through the King of England. Right. Um, that's pretty that's pretty mobster right there. He wants everybody to um con bend the knee, you know that. Yeah. Um, So the Irish, a lot of people in Ireland, i should say, aren't super happy with this, right Um it's and and so they rebel and this kicks off a series of wars that go throughout like the early sixteen hundreds. There's a number of rebellions. One of them is led

by a guy named Dodoherty. Uh and in sixteen o eight he loses this rebellion and he had owned like he was one of these guys who's owned a shipload of irelansh Irish land. Um and because he loses this rebellion, all of the land he's owned is granted to the Lord Deputy, a guy named Author Chichester, which is virtually Chichester's a name and both as a first and a last name that you're going to hear a couple of times in this story. I had never heard it before,

this terrible name. Terrible name, not like Authority, which is a good name. I like, it's pretty like it's it's always fun, always fun saying to say in Irish names. Um, so England had only kind of I mean, part of how England wins the victories in these wars. They're finding it's not just them coming in as as will be the case with like all of their colonial wars. They're not just sending in an army and crushing the local opposition.

They are allying with Irish rebels, right, and they're kind of playing these different chieftain or not with rebels, but they're playing these different chieftains off each other. So some of these Irish chieftains stay loyal to the crown and they fight on behalf of the crown against other Irish people, right, And that's how it's it's going to be the same in Africa, right with these peeps like the King's African

rifles and whatnot. You know, that's where we get our idiom means and whatnot is these colonial soldiers who are getting played against other you know, indigenous people's. Um. Yeah, it's a bummer, it's a real bummer. And this is not I had said previously that Ireland's kind of the first colony of England. That doesn't mean it's the first place that the English like conquer. That's not England, right,

because they take whales and they take Scotland first, right. Um. But those again, there's people probably in both places who will argue. But I think there's a difference with what happens in those places and what happens in Ireland that makes Ireland more of a colony situate. Because people always are conquering each other, right, they do it everywhere. They do it in Africa, the New China, they all every every group of human beings. There have been some who

have like conquered others. What what we start to see happening in this developing colonial period is different. And one of the things that's really different is that when when the English, you know, take have to fight their fights with Scotland. The same thing happens where there's groups of nobles in Scotland who sided with the English English Crown and help crackdown and rebellions, and there's groups that rebel.

The same thing happens in Wales. But once those wars are over, the Welsh and scott lords who had sided with the English crown get a piece of the pie, right, Like they get integrated to a signific pretty significant extent, and like the ruling class of this this forming thing that's going to become the United Kingdom. Um. And so a lot of these Irish chieftains who side with the crown think like, well, something like this is going to happen with us, right, which seems like a good deal.

You know, it's not going bad for these these folks. Yeah, it's like it's it's when assimilation works, yeah, right, It's like we'll just assimilate you into the culture and everything's everything's fine. Yeah, And it seems like this is the I mean yeah, and and and that's kind of what a lot of these folks who have sided with the crown expect to happen in Ireland. It's not how things work out, and I want to quote next from the book The Invention of the White Race by Theodore Allen.

The option for racial oppression left no room in the ranks of the colonial upper crap upper class for Catholic Irish chieftains, for all that some of them might wear the titles sir. The English therefore proceeded systematically with the repudiation of their promises to their Irish wartime allies, whether they had been enemies or allies in the Tyrone War, whether they flew to arms or merely protested at court.

The Irish of chieftain class were to be demoted socially to the status of no more than small landlords, politically excluded from posts of authority, and placed socially beyond the pale of British respectability, tannistry and gavel kind. The Celtic forms of succession and inheritance were outlawed. Irish chieftains might be expropriated and put to death for making an appeal based on Celtic law, and the practice of the Catholic

religion was outlawed. Britain's were forbidden to acquire land from Britain's, that is, English or Scots they were to get it from the Irish. In the sixest sheeted Ulster counties, only a score of the deserving Irish were allowed to keep as much as one thousand acres of land. They just yeah, it's so bad, and it's like, I know, I'm looking back at history, you know, I'm kind of like Monday more quarterback in here, but like it just seems so arbitrary.

Of this is wrapped up in the Catholicism Anglicans split. It's got to be that, right, because I'm un it. I mean, like because again, like to this day, like you know, with the ways people feel about Italians where I'm like, why not domn I'm like, is it what

they don't count? I'm like, is it? Is it that? Anyway? Yeah, it has to be the religion thing and then being able to fold that into your your construction of yeah, because it starts, it doesn't And it's just that like these initial divisions, uh, and the kind of conflicts they spawn just keep deepening over time, because it doesn't until the Irish are even more than just sort of a subject, a subject people um seen as like a conquered people who have to be kind of brutally kept in their place.

Like this is a kind of an evolving understanding. None of this happens overnight. Um, And I'm like, but yeah, by and large, I'm like, relatively speaking, the space between the British and the Irish is like l A and the Valley. Like, yeah, there's there's suburbs in the United States that are closer to their cities of origin than like or further than like Dublin is from from London. Yeah, it's not even it's not even like to San Francisco.

It's not even lay San Francisco. I'm like, yo, like day day round the corner, Like, yeah, there's I think, like Kanye's farm in Wyoming is a significant chunk of the landmass we're talking about here. Yeah, I'm just like it's only um, yeah, they're not far away, but like in terms of like the cultural differences, it is pretty vast, and it's growing this period in part because English elites

really come to despise the Irish as a race. Lord Chichester um who wound up I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. I'm sure something like Jerry or some ship. Because it's English names, it's always like what no of course you pronounced Chichester. Chichester. It's pronounced you know. Yeah, okay, I'm reading one. For reading the letters on the page, for trusting the way you wrote this, that's I mean. I'm sorry, Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't. I didn't realize it was pronounced

lester because it's not at all spelled like lester. There's there's not an L anywhere in here, and that's why I thought there wasn't pronounced lester. It's one of those things, like whales. You look at the way things are spelled in Welsh and it makes like I would never even try to pronounce those, but at least they don't. They aren't pretending to be something friending. You look at a Welsh where and you're like, okay, well, I don't know

how to say that. You look at the word for lester and it's like, oh, well that looks like a thing that I should be able to just read. But no, exactly, Nope. Anyway, whatever, we don't trust you. We'll talk about this racist asshole in a second. We're back. So, Lord Chichester, who winds up in possession of that rebel Adoherty's land? He writes shortly thereafter quote I have often said and written, it

is famine which must consume the Irish. Our swords and other endeavors work not for that speedy effect which is effect expected for the overthrow. So even in it, in this period of time, the sixteen hundreds, you have English lords being like there's too many Irish, they're too quarrelsome we got an engineer of famine, right, like, just to video, y'alls, there's too many of Starvation is going to be the

best way to deal with these people. British thanos and a lot of English nobility are going to spend quite a bit of time engineering. Really, what's a series of disasters? Because before the Great Hunger there are a couple of other pretty terrible famines, one of which kills hundreds of thousands of people. We just don't talk about it much

anymore because the Great Hunger is even worse. Um, But you know, I want to talk about like how they did this because it's all wrapped up in kind of this landlording system that arises over the course of a couple of centuries in Ireland. Um. Now, we we chat on this show pretty regularly about serfdom, which is a social situation that existed in a lot of Europe throughout

the medieval period and existed in Russia until the eighteen sixties. Right, Russia doesn't free their serfs until right around when UM the Amounts of Patient Proclamation is signed there within a couple of years of each other. UM and serfdom is a type of slavery. It's not nearly as bad as like chattel slavery in North America, UM in part because obviously one of the worst things about chattel slaveries families get split up. Right, you can like sell individuals from

families and separate them from their loved ones. Surfs are bound to the land, so they are part of the property parcel that you own, So you can't like split up families outside of like drafting people to go fight in wars, which which absolutely does happen and is pretty unpleasant. UM. But it does mean like the downside of being a surf is that you're not really free, you can't leave, you can't really do anything but be a serf. The upside is that number one, you're not you're not really

paying rent. You know, like you can't get kicked off the land because yeah, yeah, I've always I've always explained it like, okay, you know when you when you like if you're renting an apartment and the apartment has a stove watching machine, like it's already there, Like it just it kind of comes with the apartment, you know what I mean. It's like it's a surf. Yeah, they're kind of like you just come with the land when I buy it, you know. Yeah, it's I'm sure this will

happen in like another three years. But imagine if your landlord owned you, and that meant that you had to do what your landlord said and work in whatever job they wanted you to work. But you also couldn't get evicted. Um, so it would be a kick you out, but you also can't move. Yeah, exactly, So it sucks. But also it's really where I'm bringing all this up to say that like as bad as Serfdom was, it is vastly superior to what Irish peasants are enduring from the sixteen

hundreds and seventeen hundreds. I think it's important to like, for you know, future reference for any any listener, especially like the type of listeners that you and I have to when you talk about slavery to understand sort of the gradient of types of slavery, and I think yeah, like on one end of the spectrum is sort of like yeah, like a like a conquered village, you know what I mean, Um, and you're taking the warriors to do something or some sort of like serfdom if you will,

all the way to this, Yeah, well the humans are prob where humans are are cattle like, so that's like chattel slavery, you know what I'm saying, Like there's a a scale, you know what I mean, If you will, it's really important because a lot of the especially folks who want to minimize chattel slavery that exists in the United States, they'll be like, well, slavery exists everywhere and it's always bad, which is like saying war exists everywhere

and it's always bad. It's like, yeah, but different kinds of wars others like yes, like desert storm war is bad, but desert storm was not as bad as for example, the German innovation of Russia. It was worse than the other. And it's like, yeah, like Roman, and there's often gradients, Like we talk about ancient Roman slavery. There were slaves in ancient Rome who would have who would have felt very similarly about their situation to chattel slaves in North America.

These would have been slaves working on the lat of Fundia, which were these massive agricultural plantations or in the minds, and these are terrible lives for these slaves and they're worked to death and it's it's really a miserable situation. But a lot of slaves in ancient Rome would have been more or less we're working internships, like and they're

not even unpaid, like they're getting paid a lot. Like you when when you get freed and you had you would get free generally before too much time as like a household slave or like, yeah, like people would people, particularly educated Greeks, would sell themselves into slavery to become teachers for rich people because it was like a better life.

So it's not like if you're like, you can't just say, like slavery in Rome was this because there are a bunch of different types of slate and anyway, totally we're getting off the subject. Yeah yeah, yeah, but yeah, yeah, but I think that's a very important distinction, especially like when you're trying, like you said, having a cultural dialogue with somebody about, like I said, minimizing the experience of one person sort of playing like this oppression Olympics to

where you like it. It really is different though. Yeah, it's worth understanding that because the Irish in this period they're not slaves in any way. Um, but also in there's a degree to which there's certainly worse off in most ways than surfs. Um. It's because of this landlording

system that evolves. So throughout the sixteen hundreds, like this period, there there's this process of the Celtic feudal system being dismantled piece by piece and ownership of the land being transferred to English landlords, most of whom were what you'd call absentee landlords. Right, they don't live in Ireland. Thankfully that doesn't exist anymore. Nobody here pays rent. Nobody listening to the show pays rent to somebody who lives far away,

and it's just kind of collecting a check. That doesn't happen anymore, but it did in this period. It never happened. So first of first I couldn't follow you. I was like, wait, that he's making a joke. I'm yeah, I'm just being a lass. So throughout the sixteen hundreds, England confiscates more

than three million acres of land um. And yeah, this this during this period of time, Irish peasants changed from being more or less in a similar position to peasants in a lot of Europe to being renters um and this winds up being a lot worse under what can to be called the Middleman system. And there's a couple of different ways that this kind of works. It's not the same across all of Ireland. But one of the ways in which this works is called the Middleman system.

And in this English people acquire land which they then let to a fixed rate to a single english person who lives in Ireland. So the land is like owned by an english person who lives outside the island, and then they basically lease it to an English person who lives in Ireland and works as like a property manager,

and he sub lets the property to peasants. These are This is a very modern system in a lot a lot of this is gonna sound very familiar, not to like, I'm not trying to compare this to like rental situation

people living in San Francisco. It's obviously, like not not to minimize the horror what's happening in Ireland, but like legally on paper, there's there's some real similarities between and in part because like what is figured out in this period of time spreads in a lot of ways, like a lot of the different attitudes towards how leasing and renting and stuff should totally kind of being invented in

this period um. So the middleman system allows landlords to profit handily off of Irish land and labor without actually seeing the people they're exploiting. You know, that's up to the middleman to do the direct exploiting, so you can

just kind of take the cash. Another system that is popular in chunks of Ireland is called land tenure um and in this system, absentee landlords rent small tracts of land directly to peasants without a middleman um and over the course of two hundred years or so, there's kind of some different ways that this works, but the ultimate result is that most Irish peasants, like three million people by the time the Great Hunger starts, wind up living

on these very very small plots of land. We'll talk about this more later, but they keep getting divided up more and more over time. Um in his nineteen sixty two text The Great Hunger historian Cecil Wouldham Smith, which is a very English name for a guy who's who's writing a very critical book about the Great Hunger proper Cecil Smith. Um, I just can't get over some of these names anyway. The land Uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from Cecil, who I think is actually a pretty

good historian. The land system, thus introduced, was a method of government, a badge of conquest, and a means of holding in subjection of the common people. Ireland was a conquered country, the Irish peasant a dispossessed man and his landlord and alien conqueror. So while it is tempting and to some extent worthwhile to again note some similarities with our modern landlording system, it's also important to see how

unique this system was. The English crown is essentially using a really decentralized network of landholding arrangements to dispossess the Irish peasant, and this ensures if you don't own your farm, you can't ever make anything extra right. Like you know what, We'll talk again this a bit more. But like it.

It ensures the fact that nobody owns anything and the fact that people don't have any permanent ties to the land that they're born and raised on, um means makes it very hard for peasants to put together the resources or have the stability that could lead to organized resistance. It doesn't make it impossible, there is organized resistance at periods, but it makes it a lot harder. Um. It also makes it it's very another thing that's very familiar, yes, exactly.

And obviously when this, when aspects of this system get taken over to other parts of the world, they get a lot worse, right, Like, it's definitely worse for other people outside of Ireland when some of these things are like morphed but you can see shades of the tactics that the British Empire would use everywhere here um, and shades of like what the United States is going to do to indigenous people, you know, right, Like there's elements of that in here um because it's you know, it's

a lot of things being tested. Yeah. Um. So English land laws are imported to Ireland, and these laws quote pushed to their extreme the rights of landlords and conceded nothing to the occupiers in respect of their customary rights. Under the old Irish customs, Irish renters did not get to lease the land they lived on. There are no leases in this period, so everyone is at will, which means you can be evicted at any moment for any reason or no reason at all. Um, there's no warning

that has to be given. It doesn't like you can be paying your rent and they can still kick you off. It doesn't matter. Um. Tenants also received no kind of

compensation for improving the land that they farmed. So a big part of farming, if you've ever farmed, is to like do things over time that make your land more productive and like increase your yield and make what you're on more valuable and also more capable of more easily providing a more food, both for money and for taking care of your yourself of the people who live there. You there's no point in doing that if you're an

Irish Irish tenant farmer. Um. We'll get into that a little bit more too, But like because you you own nothing, um, It's it's good for people to have a sense of ownership and the things that they live in. Like, it's it's broadly positive so yeah, I was just like why why I'm now now I'm curious as to like, why do they why would you think that this like would

be successful? Well like that, Yeah, but I'm like just in the initial thinking of like I would want if I own the land I wouldn't want, and I and own a land in a place that I don't even live and I probably ain't seen in years, I would want to make sure that that land is getting better. So I'm like, so I'm like, make my land better just because I'm telling you to, or just like I just thought. Maybe I'm just again modern eyes where I was like, man, I would want to incentivize, like yo,

keep avocado. You know what I'm saying, Like, hey, if you could pick my soil, I want to take one of my avocados for yourself, Like I would think to me,

I don't know what I'm saying. There there are that there are some landlords, because again we're we're talking abroad here, there are certainly landlords who like offer better deals to people and who do try to encourage, you know, like I'm never going to kick you guys off, like you can improve your land that that happens to But but broadly speaking, it does not happen on a wide scale, and we're going to talk about why. But this is very much a conscious decision that people are making, and

there's it's a mix of ideology. We're going to talk about some aspects of like free market capitalism are being invented. So a big part of the fear here is that if you create a situation by which people would want to improve their land, that's by definition a situation which they have more control over the land they live on, which means you are violating the sacred property rights of the lord. Right. That's a big chunk of of why

they don't want that to exist. Because yeah, yeah, we're we're gonna get Adam Smith is going to come into this story in a big way not not too long from now. So, but obviously we're not there yet. Six nine Adam Smith is just a glimmer in I don't

know some other Smith's I at this point. So, uh, William of Orange in sixteen nine beats the Catholic king James the Second at the Battle of the boyne Um, and this spells the end of organized Catholic power in Ireland and is seen by Protestants in Northern Ireland as kind of like an Independence day sort of situation. Battle of the Boyne is a big thing for the Protestants

in Northern Ireland. Um. And again it's often seen as like, yeah, you have this like fight between the Catholics and the Protestants, and the Catholics lose and and it it leads to a lot of tragedy. It's again, as is always the case with Irish history, much messier than that, because the reality is that the Pope in Rome actually backs William of Orange against the Catholic King James as part of

a strategic scheme to funk with King Louis of France. Um. And he secretly funnels the modern equivalent of three and a half million pounds sterling to William. Money that's spent on swords and muskets to kill Catholic isn't it. Yeah, And we don't find it. We we didn't learn this until documents were uncovered in two thousand eight. Like for in terms of like to give you an idea of like how good the fucking Catholic churches and both documenting

ship and keeping it lockdown. This happens in sixteen ninety and it doesn't drop until two thousand eight. Dog, the US government's bad at FOIA requests. Do you understand what I'm saying? I just heard today. I just heard day Trump out there hiding seven hours like phone content, Like, okay, see if you can keep that hidden for full honey years. Popes like that's that, that's j V ship. Yeah, Popes like Rookie Cookies, rich shirt. There wasn't even be United

States when we started covering up war. Cry you need you need country. Yeah, we we've got. We're hiding ship older than your concept of of of society. Yeah we got. We got dudes, old, sacred and your constitution gotta love it. Throughout the early seventeen hundreds, the Irish peasantry languished better off than slaves, but worse off in a lot of

ways than surfs. The fact that landlords could increase rent whenever they wanted meant it was pointless again to try and farm for cash crops worth much more like there's not a lot. There's not a point in massively increasing your yields or improving the land because they can change your rented will. So if they see, oh they doubled their productivity this year, I'm gonna double rent, So why would you do that? Why would you put in that? Why would you exactly? So you you pay in in produce. Yeah,

generally basically right like you're because you're you're farming. You are a farmer, so you're farming both to feed yourself and you are farming to pay your rent. I mean, if you've got this middleman, you can't just be like

hide and corn somewhere. But it's harder because he's and there's there's obviously there's always local collaborators whose jobs like you know, um, and there's also the people always do get away with ship right the same you know, we're flattening things a little bit because there's a lot of history to cover here, of course, and you have what's

what's a what's ahead of lettuce between friends? Yeah, but there's there's also so not only there's no point in like massively increasing your yields as a farmer, because they'll just up your taxes, but there's also not much of a point in improving the land because if you make the land a lot better, then your landlord will kick you out and we'll sprint it to someone else for

more money. Yep. You know, like why why why would you? Um? Now, historians have noted that one major issue with achieving progress under the feudal system, this is everywhere that there is a feudal system, is that like this is broadly a thing that happens in feudalism. Feudal lords in a lot of Europe throughout the medieval period have fairly little incentive

to invest in or improve their lands. If you may like a region a lot more agriculturally productive or whatever, UM, then number one, it looks more enticing for your rifles to attack and try to take. But also the money that you invest in improving that land is less money that you're spending on your military. You know, if you're smart and careful, over time it can work out for you. But it's like a risk. You're taking a gamble if

you if you divert resources for that UM. And this is one of the reasons why feudalism doesn't you know, people find other things to do, because it's it's not great for all kinds of progress, right, like I think I do like And one of the things that's interesting is England has even though there's a king, still they've moved beyond this system in this period. That's part of why they conquer the world, right, as they developed kind of new systems that are more conclusive to the kind

of progress that is beneficial. Um. But with this system of absentee landlords that they put in place over Ireland, they find a way to deny the Irish any benefits of modernization. UM. When enterprising irishmen try to make a life for themselves in other ways besides farming, the Crown cracks down on their ambitions. In the Famine plot, Tim pat Coogan rights, Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest.

Instead of being developed, valuable cattle, fishing and woolen industries were taxed out of existence when they came into competition with either British trading interests or her military concerns, which led her to disrupt Irish trade with both France and America.

So like, not only is it a ship situation for farmers, but whenever people try to do anything else, try to go into business or whatever, that gets destroyed via like taxing or via like different there's different ways the government has a fucking this over in order to protect English businesses. You know, you know when there's no way out for

the Irish. Really. There's even this brief period in the early eighteen hundreds where they're starting to industrialize more and the the the number of Irish people who are kind of like working in these factory jobs, industrial jobs, the don off industrial revolution is increasing and then it plummets

right before the Great Hunger. And part of that is that like, well, we don't want Irish industry to compete with British, like we want to sell them that stuff for one thing, Like that's not why they're they're they're not there to develop their island into you know, a lot of Yeah, and we're talking are like are we we're still talking like Ireland as a whole? Are we talking Northern Ireland? Were Yeah, We're it's just Ireland at this polet. I mean, it's it's it's it's all under

the control of the crown, right. So there are like what you've got up in the north, like places like Ulster in particular. Ulster is basically founded as a colony of English people in Ireland. Um, so yeah, you do. And again this is kind of like Ulster is founded right along the same time. It's like so that like the English, you're founding colonies in the east coast of North America, so they're actually kind of colonizing Ireland in similar ways to how they're colonizing the America's at around

the same period of time. UM. So obviously all this the fact that England is kind of hamstringing Irish growth has impacts beyond just keeping the Irish downtrodden. Um. English landlords could have been proved this situation while remaining into control in control if they'd agreed to enter into contracts with their tenants like leases, that would maybe limit their ability to increase rent or evict people. But they weren't willing to do this, and that's part of why there

can be no progress. In a paper for the Marquette Law Review, Cynthia Smith writes, because the landlord's goal was to extract as much money from the land as possible, any contractual agreement with tenants would have been an obstacle to this rent seeking. In addition to rent seeking, there were a number of reasons why English landlords neglected to invest in their holdings in Ireland. The small size of holdings, the uncertain political situation, general economic conditions, and the availability

of more lucrative investment alternatives. All of these factors may have contributed to the landlord's reluctance to improve. Landlords were further deterred from investing because they were already making a substantial profit on the rent collected on the unimproved land. Finally, landlords neglected to make improvements because they feared that tenants would use the investments so intensively that the value of

the improvement would depreciate it too high a rate. Misuse of an improvement was likely to occur when tenants had no security of tenure. However, if tenants had been given some security, misuse would not have been a problem because tenants would have been in the process of maximizing their net income and used the improvement optimally. So there's like a number of different ways this could work, and this is how things work in a lot of other parts

of Europe that are modernizing. Um. But the absolutely, yeah, it's slum lording ship on the scale of an entire people, right, yeah, Like they England has turned Ireland into a slum um so that they can lord over it. Now. The backwardness of pre famine agriculture in Ireland caused by the inefficient investment. Of This becomes apparent when Ireland's labor productivity in eighteen

forty five is compared to English labor productivity. Um, Like, British people are like twice as productive as Irish people in eighteen forty five, Like if you're kind of like looking at them as economic units. Um. And this is because there's just been no development that's been allowed to occur, um, not none, but very little. But even that scale or

comparison is like it's so infuriating. It's like, well, look we're more productive than y'all, Like, well I wonder why, yeah, yeah, Well, and this is going to justify it's going to be used to justify a lot of racism against the Irish because like, well, look they're not very productive, like they

just can't keep up with the modern society or whatever. Um. So, landlords find that the easiest way to increase profits from generation to generation is to further subdivide their lots, which allows them to rent to even greater numbers of the growing Irish population. And these peasants again, these people who live in these renting situations, they make their living by growing different grains and other kind of like export crops, and then those crops are exported and that's what pays

their rent. Since rent race is constantly but their amount of land is fixed and in fact often shrinking. Irish peasants are caught in this unwinnable cycle of increasing poverty, and the desperation of their situation leads them to embrace a recent import from the New World potatoes. Now we talk a lot, I mean there's a lot of like talk in popular culture about Ireland and the potato. Obviously, the potato comes from again the New World. It's not

like a native to Ireland. The reason why they adopt it so quickly is that the potato is one of the very few single foods on Earth that can be you can live off of nothing but potatoes if that's all that you have, you can you can especially different kinds of potatoes. There's all sorts of different strains. Some of them have different kinds of nutritional values. But um potatoes have like vitamin C and stuff like they have what you need to not iohold you. I think I

got through a year in college on French fries. Yeah. Yeah, no, I acnology. I I could live off a potato. Yeah, And they also grow, and you can grow it in really bad soil. So the way in which these plots are subdivided each like family, you know whatever, farming in it, however you want to phrase it has like a small chunk in the land that they live on has a small chunk of like good land, and then usually like bogs and stuff and like hillsides that's less good for growing.

And so one of the things you can do with potatoes is in the good land you have, you can grow ship like corn that you're going to export and sell, and in your ship land you can just sew potatoes and those will keep you alive. Right. Potatoes also aren't worth anything as an export crop. They're just not worth selling really, um. So it also it's what you eat because you can't profit off of it. It's just win

win man like it does. Yeah, yeah, especially because I'm like I will Okay, this is a bit of a tangent, but I will defend to my grave in and out fries. I know everybody talks they're not bad, they're bad. I like them. I think it's because, yeah, you know why, because they taste like potatoes. I feel like everybody arguing over fries like, I'm like you eating wax and salt and you think, of course that's gonna taste great because it's yeah and potatoes. Now look, I look, who's your

top five fry? Don't lose your place top five fries. I have strong opinions about this. I mean, I really like, I'm a waffle fry guy, and I haven't eaten there in a long time, but I do. I did love Chick fil A back in the day when I was a younger man. I haven't had their fries in like ten years, so I don't know. Maybe they're not as as good as No, they're still they still slap. I'm less that's a good choice fries. I was like, No, I was about to say, I was just about to say,

wing stop. We had him yesterday. One thing incredible because they taste like potatoes and are actually seasoned. They taste like season potatoes. Here's here's a little tip that I do. Sometimes I'll get those five guys fries and then this is key. You know that that like spicy chili oil you can get from Creator Joe's. Yes, I put a bunch of them in like a baking pan. I get

like a tablespoon of chili oil. Dollop it over there, smear it all around the potatoes, pop them in the oven at three fifty for like ten minutes to crisp them up with the fucking it's slaps. It's good. You just changed my life because I'm like, I am definitely the like, don't leave your fries around me, you know what I'm saying. Don't like don't walk away from your plate. Don't look away. I'm taking your fries. We all love potatoes. Now.

The problem is and and and also it's worth noting it may not sound like eating nothing but potatoes is a very healthy diet Irish people. One of the things that is noted in this period is that they tend to be larger and seemingly healthier than English people of a similar socio economic class. And it's because they're they they they're they're eating a lot of potatoes, which, compared to like a lot of the diets available to people at the time without money, is one of the better

options for being relatively healthy. Also, the English cuisine just man, yeah, we don't. We don't need to talk about British food, like I was like, man, I do like Irish breakfast though, I'll give I think the Irish are one of the better breakfast making peoples of the world. You know who else makes good breakfast? Well? I was going to do Yeah, I was like, well about that island where you hunt? Okay, Sophie is angry at me now, so here's ads. All right.

So we've been talking about how wonderful potatoes are, and they are and how like it's actually not again comparing I'm not talking trying to say an objective modern terms, but based on the kind of diets available back then, living off potatoes in this period is not a bad way to make a go of it. Um. But one of the issues is that over time on Ireland everyone gravitates to growing just one single strain of potato because it's the best one for the It produces the best yields,

and it's the most nutritious. It's called the lumper. It's not particularly tasty, but it is your works the biggest bang for your buck and towards of like calories you can grow per square whatever. Um. So this works for a while, right, Like, while the lumper is growing, well, this is great because people get a lot of food and people like not starving to death. The problem is that if you're if everyone is growing one kind of potato,

then you have what's called a mono culture. I was just about to say, it's not like monocultures ain't good. I just left the coffee farm uh in Colombia and they were talking a lot about biocultures and monocultures and like like just just to add to your existential dread. Uh. According to these like expert coffee farmers, they're like, look, we got about maybe thirty more harvests in US unless we start doing more like bioculture, you know, multi culture.

This is a problem with every kind of agriculture, right whenever you do it's that there's like monocultures. If I'm not mistaken, people will point out that like one reason why banana flavored candy tastes so unlike bananas is that it was based on the flavor of a banana that basically doesn't exist anymore because they all got wiped out and now we eat a different kind of banana. Um. You look into the history of farming bananas, it's wild.

But the good thing about when a plague wipes out all of the bananas is that like for a while people don't get bananas, Like it's an economic problem for people. But I don't think many people have commercially farmed bananas as the vast majority, if not the entirety, of their nutritional existence, right. Um. Not to minimize the problem that a banana blight causes. UM, but you can see how this works great for a while, but when you get a disease that's going to funk over the potato, it's

going to be a problem for Irish people. But also, again, to go back to what you're saying at the start, it's not a problem that like there's no food in Ireland because Irish people are only growing potatoes on a fairly small chunk of the land they have. Most of the land they have is going to grow food that they're going to export in order to make their rent right.

It's important to keep that in mind. So near the turn of the eighteenth century, resentment and anger over the suffering under English domination leads to another rebellion in Ireland. This one is aided by the French who are in like you know they France and that have been fighting for like a century almost by the point of which this happens, yeah, yeahs And France actually tries to land troops in Ireland twice. They land an army once, but

it doesn't go great for them. Um, it's not real easy to like, if you're France, land an army in Ireland that's going to be capable of and this this actually keeps happening for forever. In World War One, the Germans try to land a ship full of guns on in Ireland to like and it did a little bit, but the rebellion that that comes afterwards doesn't work great. Um, I don't know that that that's the there's a whole story.

There are a lot a lot of people try to land armies or guns in Ireland in order to not because they particularly care about Irish liberation, but because like the English, and this seems like an easy way to screw them up. It never quite works. Um. So when these French guys, you know, they have their their fight, and this this kind of the fact that someone's fighting the English leads a lot of Irish people to be like, well, we might have a shot at like doing something here.

So there's a rebellion. Tim pat Coogan rights. However, rebellion spearheaded by the United Irishman, was bloodily suppressed. At the time. It was frequently said that the sev rebellion was secretly encouraged by direction of the English Prime Minister, William Pitt, so that it would go off half cocked before the Society of United Irishman could succeed in their aim of uniting Catholic, Protestant and dissenter against the Crown. Certainly, English

policy seemed directed at fermenting rather than aboording rebellion. Troops were forcibly billeted on unwilling Catholic farm owners in the Yeomanry, the Protestant militia was given a free hand in oppressing their Catholic neighbors. Fair minded Protestants were outraged at what they saw on Easter Tuesday, April tenth at Newton Mount

Kennedy in County Wicklow. A Protestant farmer named Joseph Holt, attending the sound the town fair, was sickened to witness the ancient Britons cutting the haunches and thighs of the young women for wearing green stuff petticoats. So like pretty brutal stuff happening here, like slice and ladies at the market because they're wearing green and that's Irish stuff. Also, it's worth noting like one of the things that the British due to piss people off, is forced them to

quarter soldiers in their homes. We joke a lot about the Quartering Act and about like the what is the third Amendment like that that you can't quarter soldiers, and there's like there's a reason why people felt that needed to be in Yeah, Um, the English love quartering soldiers in your fucking house. Sometimes I'll just drive down the street past National Guard bases or military bases and just heckle, just be like, come into my house, motherfucker's that's right,

that's right. I'm give a ship, Marine Corps. You don't need to stay in my house. Yeah, I got an amendment, motherfucker's he number three say I ain't got. Sometimes I'll invite like a like a like a lance corporal into my house and be like, you know what, get the funk out, never mind, that's right, go get out of here,

Get out of here. Um, I'm gonna continue that quote from Tim pet Coogan, I respect to historian of the period has written is the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite Wars and the Great Famine. In the space of a few weeks, thirty thousand people peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenseless women and children were shot down or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the cannon. One of the

malicious tactics was pitch capping. A canvas crown was placed on the head of an insurgent or alleged insurgent, and boiling tar was poured into the canvas. Around after this had time to set, the cap was torn off, taking with it much of the croppy's scalp. The term croppy came from the habit of some insurgents of cropping their

hair in the fashion of the French revolutionists. The hatred of Protestants for the Catholics was such that the commanding English general Abercrombie became so revolted by the people he was defending that he had as little to do with them as he possibly could. And you'll see this again later in the famine. Were like British soldiers are horrified at some of the things being done to Irish people. They never really do anything about it. But they're they're

really really concerned. I wonder how Ambercrombie feels about his his legacy now, Oh, I think pretty good. I mean what he thinks of it. Now, I'm saying in the sense that he's just some sort of douche bag frat boy style dressing. Now, look, if you were at the head of an army that is burning people scalps off with pitch and you get to be remembered by shirtless dudes hanging out in the mall in two thousand six, that's not the worst way that. I guess that's not

the worst thing to do. But I'm just like, do you think do you think your little your little shirtless guys, your frat boys are like they you don't think they're soft, Like they're not as hard as you were when use meulting fool scalps or you just like that's right, look at my son. Yeah, I don't know. I mean to be fair, Abercrombie at Allister caused lots of trauma to lots of people. It's like if it's like if in very two hundred years there was like a like a

sexy gene type jeans brand called Himmler's. Yeah. Everybody's like, oh, you've got some of those Himmlers. Those are good. It's like that their models are hot. Yeah, like oh where, yeah, you got you got the new you know what I'm saying, you got you're wearing a Mussolini's I got, Yeah, those look great. I got the most linear Levins like yeah. Yeah.

So for a decade or so prior to the sevente Rebellion, there was actually Ireland gets a parliament briefly, I think, for like twelve years, which on paper gives them a small degree of autonomy from England, but not really because the parliament in Ireland is only supposed to basically do what the Parliament in England tells them to. But after the seventy rebellion, the English are like, well, we can't

even let them have this fake degree of autonomy. So will William Pitt the Younger bribes Irish parliamentarians to vote for what he called the active Union. And this is

what makes Ireland a part of the United Kingdom. So again, Ireland votes to join the UK if you ignore all of the things about it that are not legitimate, you know, yeah, like a lot of votes in history right, like probably most votes in his Yeah, I mean the history of voting is mostly the history of bribery basically is It's crazy though, like it like you mentioned earlier, how like you go to like a lot of like Irish like

football events and they got like like Palestinian flags. I'm like, I hope people seeing like how that picture is coming into play now, like why they would like um, understand

and empathize with the Palestinian plight in Ireland. Like they're like like, I hope is coming together now, like pictures getting pretty clear, you know, yeah that this this goes on again where the hundreds of years and uh and we're still at that, we're at like the middle point right right if you can even say that's over right, because there's a lot of people in Ireland, not as many as there used to be, but you can still find folks who will be like, look, man, I mean

the island is still not united. There's yeah, there's still some like ship going on. We're not thrilled about. Um. That's that Most people I know are broadly like, yeah, you know, it's it's it's certainly a lot better. Yeah, like the like in this period for sure, that whatever. Yeah, I mean it is I I did. I think a lot of folks did take some joy when like Brexit

hit and England English passports. Suddenly we're worth a lot less and some people are like going over to Ireland to try and get Irish passports, like yeah, that's right, come crawling back, baby, like long game, guys. So, with their own imperial propaganda, superior British productivity served as evidence that the Irish were a lesser race and they deserve to language. Under the guidance of an English power, they

were lampooned as a lazy and shiftless people. Much was made of the method by which they planted potatoes, and which were called lazy beds, right like because again, you don't have to It's like you're just kind of like dropping them in the dirt, right like that's how potato farming works. But like the English are like, look, the Irish are so lazy that they don't want to put in a hard work. They just want to like grow

potatoes and turn them a smarter Yeah. Well and also just because like well if they were to make more, you would just take it from you just get why like you guys again, yeah, it's this infuriating dude, Like it's pretty not great. Yeah, I'm like it reminds me of which may feel like a stretch, but like follow me here. It's like we all went to we all went to We was in school during the time, which

is the same as everybody else's time out. Just like every class you took in, like history and social studies was telling you about how socialist countries just don't work, right, And I'm like, you're telling me this while we're actively paying millions of dollars to destabilize them and then being able to like we're spending millions of millions of dollars to make their government's not work and then come tell

our kids, hey see there, the governments don't work. And it's like, well, full, that's you know why, Like you're you're just like as anybody like connecting these dots here, it ain't working because you're making it not work right. So when you're like, oh, man, they're only growing potatoes, look at them. They're just they're lazy growing potatoes and they only grow so much. You know why we only

why are we growing potatoes? That's I mean, it's like you promise people who have been enslaved that they're going to get farmland and uh forty acres, and then you don't give it to them, and then you develop like a legal system that arrests huge numbers of them uh and locks them out of the best jobs. And then a bunch of them are very impoverished, and you go, why why don't these people why aren't they better at making money? Well, maybe you didn't give them a lot

of options. Yeah, you steal from a group of people all of the land that they had lived on, uh and forced them onto tinier and tinier chunks of land while killing the vast majority of them. And then you're like, boy, why are they having such trouble adapting to modern economy? Geezempressed? Why are they so sad? Yeah, it's it's all again. It's all variations of the same story, you know. Um

so yeah, do do do do so. English media focuses a lot on how little effort the Irish put into farming, um why, ignoring the fact that Irish people are growing cash crops that are exported for the profit of benefit of English landlords and provide a lot of the food that England is growing, and in fact, despite a lot of their backwardness in terms of like agricultural techniques and whatnot. Ireland is continuously increasing productivity in this time um, and

it becomes England's breadbasket. It's also a growing source of animal products Irish Ireland supplies by eight hundred, Ireland supplies English cities with three of their beef, se of their butter, and eight six of their pork. Um just like to

name a few things. So like again, the degree to which all of this is absolutely central to the industrial revolution in England can't really be overstated because when the Irish are providing so much food for English people that get that, among other things, frees up English labor to work in like these growing factory system and new industrialized you know. Um. So the misery of life under English

domina allows most peasants just two outlets fucking and fighting. Um. The former explains why the Irish population triples from the seventeen hundreds of the early eighteen hundreds. Tim pat Coogan claims that a lot of peasants basically make the decision like, our lives can't get worse and birth controls not a thing, right, so we might as well might as well fuck you know, like what else is there? Um, And this is part

of why there's a birth explosion. There's also like potatoes are a pretty good thing to eat, and so there is calories, right, there's food for a while too. So for a number of reasons, the Irish population just blows up from about seventeen hundreds about eighteen hundred again like triples. Um. And the other thing that develops over time is like a very weird kind of fighting culture. And this is like there's a lot of racial stereotypes um about like

the Irish people as like quarrelsome and wanting to fight. Um. But there's like there's reasons why that stereotype develops, and it's because in Ireland again, people are very poor. They have a history of rebelling against the crown, and they don't have any kind of options for social advancement in

a lot of cases. And what do your young men do when like ship's rough, They like they fight, This happens every Yeah, I respect it, Like I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, drink, you drink like like alcohols, like this is the last day on earth that there will be alcohol and yeah, go home, you smash in and then you're just pissy for the rest of the day because all we're gonna

have is potatoes. So let's fight like this. This happens all over the place like this is the same ship people talk about, like the Appalachia, right, like Appalachia, and it's like honor culture and like all of the and in Ireland kind of their version of that is called faction fighting, which is there's this is a fascinating thing. I had no idea what's happening. Um, but it starts in the County Tipperary in the early eight hundreds and

it quickly spreads all over the island. And in the famine plot, Coogan explains, sometimes several hundred participants took part on either side. The most famous fight at ballyve A Strand and County Kerry in eighteen thirty four involved some three thousand contestants, of whom over two hundred were killed. The fighting gangs were based on extended families or on parishes, and normally fights took place either at fairs or on

feast days or public holidays. The weapons were chiefly seasoned blackthorn sticks, whose lethal properties were sometimes added to by the insertion of lead in the butts. These killing instruments, where the origin of the lailes carried today by by today's lepre con dolls, and even more deadly weapon was the white thorn steak, a cut from which could prove fatal. Sometimes sides and slash hooks were used. So there's just

like this again, respect it like pretty. It's like it's like, you know, you don't have m M A, but you can get a couple of thousand people together to fight in the field. Hey, just like me and my cousins. You know what I'm saying, Me and my cousin's couple homies down the street. We get to beat this block. We're gonna scrap with that block, and it's all it's all in fun. If you die, you die. I don't hate people are gonna die. Some people gonna die. You

better then muscle up. Let you talk about like this, this ship is happening and like like we talked in episodes like this is happening like Georgia. Like there's different kinds of like like it. All over the world. People find excuses to get it in big groups and beat the ship out of each other. Um, we'll be, we will be. Look when you you living in you living in the in the city of l A. You're sitting

on the porch. One of your uncles will be like, hey, you think you could beat that full up and you're like, I don't know, Like hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, come here, Hey fight my nephew. And then now y'all just in the street fighting. You know what I'm saying. Okay, you know, it's just like we're bored. Yeah, I don't hate, We're just bored, you know what I'm saying. And yeah, I tell you what. Let me tell you. Let me tell

you what I learned in those days. If somebody hits you in the middle of your nose, you're gonna go blind from tears. So don't let nobody hit you. In Aga knows that was one of great lessons I ever learned. Head down, hands up, down, hands up now again. So there's a lot going on here. Um, but this is not like the English make a lot of this in their propaganda about like how uniquely fighting the Irish are, Like we this happens all over the world, everywhere, and

everywhere in the world. It's just what happens when like you have a bunch of young men without much in the way of options for the future. You've you've ruined any sense of purpose and any forum, and that you've also like they're angry because the situation is unfair, but they it has become very clear that we're not going

to we're not going to beat the British military. You know. Um. It's also you know, this kind of feeds into this system of what are called secret societies at the time, and when we talk about like that term means something different. Now basically what's happening is insurgent groups are over ireland, right, and there's different ones right as well. We'll see later. There are some kind of secret societies that are are made up of landlords or in support of the landlords.

There's some that are in support of just Protestant cause, and there's others that are basically battling the status quo that are like like actually fighting against the these this absentee landlord system or like Catholic groups funding against Protestants. Probably one of the more interesting of these groups were called the Rock It's um. They declared allegiance to a

mythical captain Rock. This is not a guy who existed, but like they would the Rocks would carry out attacks on landlords, like they would murder or beat up landlords or rent collectors, and then they would write letters justifying what they've done, signed by Captain Rock. It was kind of like an I M. Spartacus sort of all those

Spartacus was real, obviously, you know. It's that sort of thing we're claiming that there's like this, you know, my brain is flooding right now with some sort of puns and word plays about oh just a Wayne the Rock Johnson or Chris Rock in slapt and like it's so hard to not go with the Chris Rock like and it's like, you know, when you can't land on a joke because there's too many of them fire in it. That's what just happened right now. You just remember that

thing that happened with Chris Rock, folks. Yes, um, actually in terms of if you if you're looking for something to laugh at prop the most powerful secret society in this period were called the White Boys. Um all right,

all right, um. Gustav the de Beaumont, who was a sympathetic French intellectual at the time, wrote this of the White Boys quote, they lived by an atrocious, savage code worthy of a semi barbarious population which abandoned to itself and has no light to guide its efforts, finds no sympathy to assuage its passions, and is reduced to look to rude instincts for the means of safety and protection.

These are banditti of a singular kind. To obtain arms or vengeance, they commit all sorts of outrages while they abstain from the gold or silver under their hands. So he's kind of pointing out that like they they're really more interested in vengeance than making money. They're not like traditional They're not like criminals in that sense, they really want to Like Fux, some ship up um and in many ways the White Boys are a pre to a lot of modern insurgent terrorist groups. Um. Some of them

were quite aeraded too. And in their manifesto kind of they have like this thing that is explaining what they're fighting for. They write, quote, let us strike the culpable not only in their persons, but in their dearest interests

and affections. Let not only their cattle be how hamstrung, their houses, burned, their land, turned up, their harvest, their harvests destroyed, But let their friends and relations be devoted to death, the wives and daughters to dishonor um, which is there's an allegation that when they talk about wanting people's wives and daughters to be dishonored, that they're like threatening to commit rape of They may they may yeah, they may have been. Um. You know this is this

is not not a pretty series of things that are happening. UM. So the white boys and they see them is like a precursor to the kind of anti colonial insurgent groups that would dominate a lot of late twentieth century geopolitics. Right, you can see this is like the first stirrings of some things that are going to happen all over the world. UM. In Ireland, also in this period gives birth to what some call scholars consider the first organized mass nonviolent resistance

campaign in history. UM. It's organized by a guy named Daniel O'Connell, who was one of the very few members Ireland's part of the UK Right. So I there are it is possible for Irish people to get elected to parliament. There's a long history of like what because like we'll actually we're about to talk about this. So O'Connell rises

to prominence first as a lawyer. Um, and he forms an organization called the Catholic Association in eighteen twenty three, and this was the first semi effective Irish political party in history. Um. The Catholic Association and O'Connell spent years fighting for Catholic emancipation, which they win in eighteen twenty nine. And that's what makes ancipation. Yeah, because Catholics you're not allowed to like hold land or or political office right

like you are. There is like a degree of um like apartheid for Catholics kind of in the legal sense of the word in this period in Ireland. And so Connell wins the right in this organization win the right for Catholics to sit on the Parliament. Right, so now you can have because Irish people could be on the Parliament before, but they had to be Irish Protestants. Because of O'Connell, you get your first. He is the first Catholic Irish legislator in elected or like in modern elector

I think maybe before she got all fuck. Um. This also opens up like Catholics can be lawyers in ways they couldn't before. And they're allowed to be military officers in the British military now. Um, so this is like a big civil rights campaign, right, So O'Connell forms this political party. They fight for like seven years and they win. I mean, this is a pretty massive victory, you know,

for Irish civil rights in this period. So the next year, eighteen thirty, O'Connell wins election to the Parliament and he becomes the first Catholic in modern history to sit in the English Parliament. And he's a pretty cool dude. He's poor by parliamentary standards, which means he's rich, but not rich compared to the other rich people, right like you know, um, and he dresses like a normal person. So the British elected leaders call him the King of the beggars because

he he looks poor to them. Again, is not a poor person. There are minimum financial requirements to be in parliament, right, so he's not he's not impoverished, but they they see him as impossible, and they also see him as like he is the representative of the hordes of working poor in Ireland, you know. Um. Tim pat Coogan writes he deserves to be regarded as the founder of the modern peaceful civil rights movement. His hatred of oppression was universal.

My heart walks abroad he said, and wherever the miserable is to be suckered and the slaves to be set free, there my spirit is at home, and I do like to dwell in America. He was deified by the anti slavery movement for his speeches in their favor and for the manner in which he turned down substantial money offers from slave owners, who commanded twenty seven votes in the House of Commons during the Emancipation Battle, saying, gentlemen, God knows that I speak for the saddest people the sun sees.

But may my right hand forget its cunning and made my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth before to help Ireland, I keep silent on the Negro question. And what he's saying there is there's a vote like in England band slavery in this period, right, And a bunch of parliamentarians are like, hey, dude, vote with us to keep slavery and will help you out in gaining some concessions for Irish people in Parlimad. And he's like, I couldn't. I would never be able to live with

myself if I did that. Like our situation is bad, but like this is I I could not. I could not do that. It's a it's a principal moral stand. He denounces George Washington for owning slaves, which gets him He gets a lot of the the early Irish Diastra in New York hate him because he like hates George Washington, because George Washington owns a bunch of slaves or owned a bunch of ladies. At this point, um, he gets

attacked a lot by US newspapers. The New York Herald accuses him of having a bunch of concubines and illegitimate children, because again he's like he thinks slavery's at um. By the eighteen forties, he was an old man who had spent decades fighting for his people. In eighteen forty three he embarked on one last great battle repealing the Act of Union. Right, and this thing that that brings Ireland

into the UK. Given total English dominance of parliament, this was not seen as possible, right, like, in a in a quote unquote legitimate way. The English Parliament is not going to vote to give up Ireland, right, Yeah, But he decides, well, fuck I don't. I'm not going to try and convince a bunch of English rich assholes that Ireland ought to be free. Um. So he creates what some people will say is the first modern civil disobedience campaign.

He holds a series of what are called monster meetings, which are where huge numbers of Irish people as symbol to protest in favor of independence. The first one of these is a hundred and twenty thousand people, and crowd sizes grow over the course of the year that he's doing this to three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand at a meeting in Cork. By August of that year, he's succeeded in assembling his largest crowd yet, seven hundred

and fifty thousand people. That's basically a tenth of the Irish population. More than that, really, this is forties you said, yeah, there's he gets three quarters of a million people to gather to protest for their independence. Um. And again there's a lot of I I went over the fact that there's a lot of stereotypes of the Irish is drunken,

violent in this period. He's very aware of that, and so there's this kind of volunteer order police force at these protests to make sure that there's no alcohol and there's no fighting um that people are staying absolutely in line or scrupulously abiding by the laws outside of the fact that they're gathering to to make this protest um.

And that makes it really hard for the British government to like stop this stuff, right because there's folks are so disciplined, they have trouble finding kind of an end to blow this movement up. Um. And and it's this is a real problem because it is like, you know, when you've got seven hundred and fifty thousand people assembling for something, well that's potentially a military issue. Right, if you can get seven fifty thousand folks together for anything,

you could cause some problems for the government. You know, Like that's a lot of motherfu that's a lot. Today there was a fucking protest in the US with seven people. Yeah, that's some ship could could go down. Obviously, we we had like that many people out in the street just try to stop the Iraq war and it did nothing, but it could it could mean, it could have. Yeah, it's a lot of thing if if day was up on the British was up on just you know this Oh no, I hadn't invented yet, but I'm like, no,

let's up with the tear gas. I was like, yeah, could have just do what you do now, which is just we are building to that prop Okay, but it is like I think if you wanted to, if there were a comparable civil disobedience movement in the United States, it would be it would it would be putting twenty or thirty million people into the streets in a single location day, which I don't think could happen logistically, like we don't have the roads for that. It's not obvious,

but it's this is this is huge. So O'Connell plans to hold his most critical meeting on October eighth in Clontarf near Dublin. By this point, the powers that be have grown terrified of what O'Connell is assembling. Um so his you know, they have trouble because the meetings are peaceful. But on October, in October of eighteen forty three, they decide, well, fuck it, like I don't care. Wait, we don't. We're not going to care anymore, but we're not going to

pretend to care that he's followed the rules. The Irish do not have a right to organize for independence, so they ban his meeting, and then they gather an army and they sail warships into the port and train long range cannons on the meeting site and say, if you gather, you get a million people together, we are going to show you with naval artillery. Yeah we're not just like we are shooting guns into a broad We will pound

you with bombs like yeah yeah. O'Connell has a choice here, and the choice that a lot of civil disobedience campaigners have had. It's the choice Martin Luther King made versions of where it's like, Okay, if we assemble peacefully here, they're gonna funk a lot of people up. Do we do it? And he decides no, He decides not to risk those lives, and he cancels the meeting. Um he gets arrested, he serves four months in prison for conspiracy.

And the fact that he refuses to push the British government to force them to either put up or shut up. A lot of future Irish activists are going to see this as evidence that like peaceful protest doesn't work right. This is a big part of like why the things that happened the nineteen sixteen Rising, why the decades and decades of insurgent terrorism and stuff like a lot of them will point back to O'Connell and be like, we we we tried, like people tried to do this peacefully

and and you threatened to kill us. So what else? What are what are the options? I guess we'll make box. Yeah, yeah, that's where you went, you know. Yeah, um wow. I'm always I'm always learly like and this is just my

own sort of baggage. I'm always leary when I hear, like, you know, a book say this dude was the first version of something, especially how I dude when I'm like, I don't know, but that being said this, I when you said O'Connell, like a lot of like things from my black studies like started popping up of like no, wait, we we talk about him off you know what I'm saying. I didn't know the story toil just now, but his

name like rang a lot of bells for me. And it's when I try to be clear here that like you will historians will claim that I'm not like, I can't comprehensively say no one else ever tried anything like this. I'm not I'm calling you on that. He does get credit from a lot of people for this. He's certainly like a seminal figure in the concept of non violence resistance.

But yeah, this this this, yeah, like I this is one of those dope moments on this show where like some something that you may know like vaguely kind of like final he comes in view and you're like, oh, it's complicated and a lot of ways, like I see the way that you're describing, like how he like didn't take that next step, you know in apartheid South Africa, Like you know, people make those claims about Nelson Mandela that there was like another step he did didn't take

and that you know what I'm saying, and where when he became more radicalized, you know what I'm saying, and like and so you have modern like activists that are like, uh, I appreciate you. You took the rock far enough, or didn't take the rock far enough that you took as far as you could go, but look, you wasn't down

to shoot. Yeah, And this is I mean, you'll always I think that's always going to be the case with everyone who does anything good within the context of like the civil rights movement, there's always and anyone who was like anyone who is organizing for radical social change pretty much always hits a point where they reached the end of their personal willingness to fight for kind of aradical change.

And so like nobody's perfect. We all did that, Like, there are things that we all believe right now that in a couple of generations folks would be like, how did you put up with this? Though? Ye like, I got I get why you were protesting for this and this, but how how didn you have a problem with you know, that's just like the march of time ship right, um, And I'm not like I think it'd be unreasonable to

condemn O'Connell for what he did. It's just like, this is what happened, right Like, he made the call that he made, and then the things that happened afterwards happened, And it's worth understanding that, And it's worth understanding that there is a point I'm never gonna be forgiving, like the I RA for setting off a fucking bombs and random bars and ship like, there's fun up things that happen in the the armed portion of the struggle for independence.

But when some of those advocates go back and say, like, well, we gave the non violent ship to try. They're not wrong, you know, um, and that's worth that's worth acknowledging from historical standpoint. So that's the end of eighteen forty three. In the summer of eighteen forty five, an uma seat or water mold, known today as fight oh Flora infestans. That's the best I can do. Like that, it's like an English name, last name. You know, you're not going

to get it perfect. The last four words you said, I was like, I don't know what you just said. It's like, yeah, it's a fungus, right, it starts to spread throughout Europe. We're not gonna get into a ton of detail because again, this is like particularly there's a lot of coverage that are like, really, blame this this fungus on all of the things that happen. It's not.

The fungus is fault. The fungus is like a thing that it's It's like it's like blaming the disaster in Hurricane Katrina on the hurricane when it's like that's that's not really what I'm angry about, you know. But like this, this thing, like this, this this is an important part of the story. This this thing starts to hit in Europe right um crops start to fail. It starts. It becomes increasingly clear that like, not only is there this thing affecting potatoes all over the continent, but it's like

pretty bad. It's wiping out large chunks of the harvest. Newspapers and farmers almanacs note with fear as it rampages through crops, first on the continent and then in England. On August eighteen forty five, it is discovered for the first time in Ireland at the Dublin Royal Botanical Gardens. Obviously it probably came somewhere else first, but you're going to notice it at the Royal Botanical Gardens first because

they've got the most eyes on them. The population of Ireland at this moment moment was probably close to nine million people. You know, you're talking the eighteen forties were not as good at censuses and stuff as we have probably around nine million people, little bit less. Most of

these people are Catholic. Three million of them are the kind of peasants that we've spent a lot of this episode talking about peaking out a precarious living on the land as renters utterly dependent upon the continued productivity of the potato for their caloric needs. Um, and that is the stage being set for what's going to happen next, which is not gonna be nice, but prop you know what is gonna be nice These plugables you're plug doubles. Yeah,

you're cloud very nice. Absolutely yeah man. Prop hip hop um propp uh. That's all the socials and the website. Um, there's the hood politics pod uh. Still popping and cracking and getting some Sophie's helping me get some doper not doper, but some dope guests and such. You know, we're having good time over there. Yeah yeah, prop hip hop, prop hip hop. Check it out, check out you know something else to check out? Good things? Read a book or um, I don't know, find an English person and be like

what the funk? Man, huh what the fuck? Yeah look at being this person and be like thanks, yeah, yeah, go to an English bar and just like frown, just sit in the corner and like mean muther, just mean mug um and be like what for do it? O'Connell got an alister, which I learned is like almost like the Irish like maga, Yeah, yeah, I forgot an ollister. There you go. To me, it is a little bit Maggie. You know, it sounded cool to me because I don't

know what allister means. Anyway, it was you know, it's that it's that Northern Irish Protestant stronghold that's kind of formed as a colony. Basically, you know, good stuff, good stuff, So go colonize England. You know that's what you actually really everybody, everybody colonized England. Take, suck them up.