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| ▲ | dash2 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Countries that were not under an empire also had famines and other disasters (China had a civil war with 50 million killed, IIRC) as well as endemic practices like slavery. | | | |
| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | mike_hearn 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This always comes up. Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil. This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time. This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity. Specifically: • The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine. • In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century. • There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust. | | |
| ▲ | neffy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th. So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse. Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI. | |
| ▲ | Hikikomori an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Man this is dumb. Ireland produced more food than it needed, even if we don't count potatoes. It was exported, mainly to England, as other markets could pay more. Plenty of other things the victorian's did to make the situation worse. Mainly thanks to free market idealists. Pre colonial India had famines and many ways to handle them, the British did away with them. The system they set up and replaced made it a lot worse and whatever small trickle of help they provided clearly wasn't enough. I don't know why you're trying to whitewash colonialism. That it's immoral is pretty simple, they let millions of people die for profit. |
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| ▲ | HPsquared 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Elites are generally immoral, even today. I mean only in relative terms, they were no worse than others. On the positive side, they did quite a few pro-social things as well (abolition of slavery, for example). |
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