Famine and land in Ireland and India 1845-1880: James Caird and the political economy of hunger

The perception of Ireland and India as ���zones of famine��� led many nineteenth-century observers to draw analogies between these two troublesome parts of the British empire. This article investigates this parallel through the career of James Caird (1816���92), and specifically his interventions in the latter stages of both the Great Irish Famine of 1845���50, and the Indian famines of 1876���9. Caird is best remembered as the joint author of the controversial dissenting minute in the Indian famine commission report of 1880; this article locates the roots of his stance in his previous engagements with Irish policy. Caird's interventions are used to track the trajectory of an evolving ���Peelite��� position on famine relief, agricultural reconstruction, and land reform between the 1840s and 1880s. Despite some divergences, strong continuities exist between the two interventions ��� not least concern for the promotion of agricultural entrepreneurship, for actively assisting economic development in ���backward��� economies, and an acknowledgement of state responsibility for preserving life as an end in itself. Above all in both cases it involved a critique of a laissez-faire dogmatism ��� whether manifest in the ���Trevelyanism��� of 1846���50 or the Lytton���Temple system of 1876���9.

New Ways of Looking at the State Apparatus and the State Archive in Nineteenth Century Ireland: Curiosities from that Phonetic Museum - Royal Irish Constabulary Reports and their Political Uses, 1879-91

This essay seeks to contextualise the intelligence work of the Royal Irish Constabulary, particularly in the 1880s, in terms of the wider British and imperial practice and, as a corollary, to reflect upon aspects of the structure of the state apparatus and the state archive in Ireland since the Union. The author contrasts Irish and British police and bureaucratic work and suggests parallels between Ireland and other imperial locations, especially India. This paper also defines the narrowly political, indeed partisan, uses to which this intelligence was put, particularly during the Special Commission of 1888 on 'Parnellism and crime', when governmentheld police records were made available to counsel for The Times. By reflecting on the structure of the state apparatus and its use in this instance, the author aims to further the debate on the governance of nineteenth-century Ireland and to explore issues of colonial identity and practice. The line of argument proposed in this essay is prefigured in Margaret O'Callaghan, British high politics and a nationalist Ireland: criminality, land and the law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 199

Famine and land, 1845-80

While historians once tended to displace the Famine from a pivotal position in modern Irish history, more recent research emphasizes its centrality, and focuses upon the controversial issue of state responsibility. Mortality levels from the Famine place it, proportionately, as one of the most devastating recorded human catastrophes. Official British policy towards Ireland spanned two governments, those of Robert Peel and John Russell, with historians taking a more emollient view of the former: in fact there were significant continuities between the two. The legacy of the Famine was uneven, with commercial and technological advance and the consolidation of both the farming interest and landlordism. On the other hand, recent research emphasizes evidence of continuing economic uncertainty, particularly in the West, together with ongoing landlord-tenant tensions. Rural insecurities, crystallized by the poor harvests of 1859���64, underlay the post-Famine years, and fed into the politicization of the later 1870s.