Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OP REVOLUTIONrecently by the competition of British industry. A single technicalinnovation—the substitution of the potato for the previously prevalenttypes of farming—had made a large increase in population possible;for an acre of land under potatoes can feed far more people than oneunder grass, or indeed under most other crops. The landlords' demandfor the maximum number of rent-paying tenants, and later also for alabour-force to cultivate the new farms which exported food to theexpanding British market, encouraged the multiplication of tinyholdings: by 1841 in Connacht 64 per cent of all larger holdings wereunder five acres, without counting the unknown number of dwarfholdings under one acre. Thus during the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies the population multiplied on such patches, living onlittle except 10-12 lb. of potatoes a day per person and—at least untilthe 1820s—some milk and an occasional taste of herring; a populationunparalleled in Western Europe for its poverty. 28Since there was no alternative employment—for industrializationwas excluded—the end of this evolution was mathematically predictable.Once the population had grown to the limits of the last potatopatch carved out of the last piece of just cultivable bog, there would becatastrophe. Soon after the end of the French wars its advance signsappeared. Food shortage and epidemic disease began once again todecimate a people whose mass agrarian discontent is only too easilyexplained. The bad harvests and crop diseases of the middle fortiesmerely provided the firing squad for an already condemned people.Nobody knows, or will ever precisely know, the human cost of theGreat Irish Famine of 1847, which was by far the largest humancatastrophe in European history during our period. Rough estimatessuggest that something like one million people died of and throughhunger and another million emigrated from the stricken island between1846 and 1851. In 1820 Ireland had just under seven million inhabitants.In 1846 she had perhaps eight and a half. In 1851 she wasreduced to six and a half and her population has gone down steadilythrough emigration since. 'Heu dira fames!' wrote a parish priest, revertingto the tones of chroniclers in the dark ages, 'Heu saeva hujusmemorabilis anni pestilential' in those months when no children cameto be christened in the parishes of Galway and Mayo, because nonewere born.India and Ireland were perhaps the worst countries to be a peasantin between 1789 and 1848; but nobody who had the choice would havewished to be a farm-labourer in England either. It is generally agreedthat the situation of this unhappy class deteriorated markedly after themiddle 1790s, partly through economic forces, partly through the166