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1. • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
   • CommentTimeMar 20th 2009

    (5230.1)
   Just to follow up on earlier discussions about the fact that various people donit even register on the popular western outline of history, it's a shame that this guy doesn't get a mention:
   
   
   
   link
2. • CommentAuthorlooneynerd
   • CommentTimeMar 20th 2009

    (5230.2)
   @Kosmo
   
   Yeah. Africa gets a bad wrap from most historians (not counting, of course, Egypt and North Africa). If it's not being attacked or insulted, it's being ignored.
   
   @ Scrymgeour
   
   The way I understand it, the philosophy, if not the practice, of democracy came from Egypt to Greece. I'll try to run down my sources, because frankly, Egypt is not really my strong point.
3. • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
   • CommentTimeMar 20th 2009

    (5230.3)
   I just like the idea of a King holding court surrounded by lions.
4. • CommentAuthorfatesaccomplice
   • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

    (5230.4)
   I'm Irish, mostly, so i have this burning question. How the goddamn living fuck did the the Irish suffer so bad from a potato famine when they were surrounded by water? Did no one have a fishing pole?
5. • CommentAuthorlooneynerd
   • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

    (5230.5)
   Ooh, a good question. There are a number of generally accepted reasons.
   
   -Many religious Irish thought that the famine was their fate for sins they had committed. Many just accepted their fate instead of fighting it.
   
   -They were averse to trying new food sources. This isn't a trait singular to the Irish; the early American colonists (Pilgrims) nearly starved their first year here, despite the fact that New England has one of the most abundant fish populations in the world, and at the time it's beaches were covered in shellfish.
   
   -They were too poor to afford fishing vessels or equipment. Pole fishing from the shore isn't dependable, and certainly doesn't yield enough food to feed a significant part of the population. You need netting from boats to produce enough food for a population, and no Irish at the time could afford these vessels. The Irish fishing industry had been wiped out by British competitors in the years leading up to the famine.
   
   -The Potato had worked for generations; people truly believed that the famine would end the next year, and thought they could hold out.
   
   -A few Irish aristocrats and a great many absentee land lords owned most of the land. Ireland was actually exporting a great deal of food during the famine, to pay taxes. If exportation had not been a factor, there would have been more than enough food to eat. Many thought that the land owners would relent and start giving or offering food. A few did; they created work projects and paid the Irish in food (just enough to keep them alive and working). Many thought that all land owners would adopt similar policies, which never happened.
6. • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
   • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009 edited

    (5230.6)
   To follow on from that last point I suspect lots of streams and rivers would have had restrictions on fishing to protect the sport fishing for the nobles.
7. •  
     CommentAuthorNygaard
   • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

    (5230.7)
   I find the third theory a bit hard to believe - though I don't know how rich the fishing is around Ireland, it doesn't take anything really expensive to get a simple boat, lines and nets, and pots for shellfish. If you've got that, you invest a few hours in the morning, and you will nearly always have some fish. On the population feeding scale, I might believe a combination of poor fishing (no seasonal arrivals of big schools of fish?) and a shortage of boats. But I imagine the main investment is not in materials, but in skills - maybe they just didn't have enough people who knew how to make a net, build a simple seaworthy open boat, spot a school and reliably not fall out of the boat? Feeling an urge to log into the library system for books, and go googling for numbers. No time, though :)
   
   Vaguely related - a historical theory I recently learned; apparently, someone's claiming that salt water fish wasn't in the medieval diet. The practice was (re)imported fairly late from scandinavia, where open sea fishing has been a survival necessity since the stone age. I just remember a short essay about it (by a really amazing popularizer called Frans-Arne Stylegar, I think.); I'd love to know some of the details of the sources. Archaeology, I'd imagine?
8. • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
   • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

    (5230.8)
   "I don't know how rich the fishing is around Ireland, it doesn't take anything really expensive to get a simple boat, lines and nets, and pots for shellfish."
   
   We're talking about people here who were too poor to afford FOOD.
   
   And while most of Ireland is relatively close to the sea, how far can people travel in a day on foot?
9. •  
     CommentAuthorneogrammarian
   • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

    (5230.9)
   @Nygaard- depends on where and what parts of the Middle Ages.
   
   The medieval English weren't big salt water fishermen. It was dangerous, and they (mostly) let other people do that. (Consider the thriving trade w/Iceland for salt water fish out of fifteenth-century Bristol. This is undoubtedly how the crew who set out -west- from Bristol in 1452 heard that there was land out that way).
   
   I've often suspected that the medieval English might've been more daring in sea-fishing had it not been for their plentiful rivers, and eventually extensive stew (fishpond) practices.
10. •  
      CommentAuthorBrianMowrey
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009 edited

     (5230.10)
    There were simply too many mouths to feed on meat. With a population of eight million in 1841, Ireland was far more densely populated than most places, and this was because despite poverty and oppression, the potato was a bountiful and reliable source of nutrition. British parliament was well aware of this and felt that Ireland was due for Malthusian correction, which informed their response to the famine which was to do nothing except to fund more exportation to Australia and, eventually, implement a new law which required that anyone making use of poorhouses, which were already shunned by most Irish in favor of fever, give up their tenant plots first to qualify for admission. The only real hope for keeping the Irish population alive in Ireland, grain, continued to be exported in millions of pounds per year under British regulations. Britain was reluctant to import cheap foreign corn, protecting their own corn farmers, and what they did allow to be stored and sold in small amounts in Ireland was Indian corn which had to be steel-milled to eat withouth pain or extensive cooking, and such mills did not exist on the island.
    
    From Keneally's The Great Shame:
    

    Coastal people in the west dealt with hunger by catching fish, winkles and mussels. They gathered seaweeds named crother and dulaman, the second of which was not edible until after the first frosts of winter and caused diarrhoea. In Mayo, seabirds were hunted. Men were lowered over cliffs by rope and stole eggs, fighting off large ferocious mother birds. A wicklow farmer saw groups of men cornering cattle, to cut a vein in the neck of a beast and pour off a few pints of blood into a jar. They would repair the incision with a pin and a swatch of hair cut from the animal's tail. The blood would then be salted and fried in pan. People fought over the blackberries before they had ripened. When the fish in the Ow River in Wicklow had all been caught, people ate the pencil-thick worms from the bottom of the stream.

11. • CommentAuthorlooneynerd
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

     (5230.11)
    It's a bit hard to fish from the ocean without boats. Most places I've been in the world, you can't really catch anything on the immediate coast; you at least need a reasonably long pier or bridge over a bay to get out far enough for the fish to be plentiful. I'm not sure if such a structure existed in Ireland during the time (I could be wrong, mind you).
    
    In fact, I think one reason for the mass immigrations wasn't just for the famine; the Irish were sick of dealing with the British, scik of starving, etc.
12. • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

     (5230.12)
    A quick layman's runthrough of the backgroudn to the famine. Brian's obviously studied this in detail and can correct me if I go to far astray.
    
    The English had ruled Ireland since the 14th century. Things went along relatively peacably until the Protestant Reformation when the English became Protestant for the most part the Irish remained Catholic for the most part and Ireland was used as a base for a series of attempts by the French and other Catholic powers to restore the Catholic Stuart dynasty - attempts which were suppressed savagely.
    
    Catholics in Ireland became effective second class citizens - until the 1790's they couldn't own land until 1829 they couldn't vote and even then the electoral system meant only a small proportion of the Irish Catholic population got to vote.
    
    Virtually all the arable land was owned by English absentee landlords, some of whom literally never set foot on Ireland in their entire life. These estates were run by agents who paid a fixed rent to the landowners and got to squeeze as much as possible out of the tenants. The land lease system said that tenants could be evicted at any time and that any improvements on the land (like say a house) passed to the land owner without the need to compensate the former tenant.
    
    So you had a system where there were effectively no incentives to invest or work harder. Make more money, the land agent increases your rent, improve the property and the land agent evicts you and gets the benefits of your labor.
    
    Under these conditions it was next to impossible to make a living off a small holding. The men worked on the land farmed by the agents on behalf of the land owners and tended their own patches on the side. Outside paid work and growing as much food as possible on your leased land were both essential just to make a m nimal living.
    
    The crofters main staple was potatoes supplemented by dairy products, wheat and the occasional bit of meat or vegetables bought with the proceeds of paid work. Crofters who had a surplus of potatoes sold them and potaioes were dirt cheap making them the principal food of the Irish working class in the cities.
    
    When the potato harvest fell by 2/3s or more for several years running, the crofter's surplus of potatoes disappeared and the price of food in the cities skyrocketed. At the same time, the crofters became even more dependent on outside paid work - and the increased labor supply meant wages declined further.
    
    It's worth noting that large parts of Scotland, Germany and Scandinavia were as dependent on the potato as Ireland and also suffered crop failures. These countries mostly avoided actual famine and that's probably due to the different economic and legal systems at work in those countries.
13. • CommentAuthorlooneynerd
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

     (5230.13)
    I AM wondering something, actually. I know most of the Irish couldn't afford to even own any land, or a boat, or even to buy food. How did so many end up being able to afford tickets to America and other places?
14. • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

     (5230.14)
    A lot of them took indentures meaning in exchange for their fares they had to work as bonded labor for 7-10 years when they got to their destination.
15. • CommentAuthorlooneynerd
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009

     (5230.15)
    Ah. Okay. That makes sense.
16. •  
      CommentAuthorBrianMowrey
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009 edited

     (5230.16)
    It's still kind of puzzling, and my book (which is the sole extent of my resource on the subject of Ireland, aside from that Barley movie) doesn't really hit that issue square. It mentions, to add to indentures, the occasional charity of landlords, who couldn't do anything else for tenants behind on their rent, and the Irish Emigrant Society, through which the arrived and entrenched immigrant population in New York sent passage money and pre-paid tickets back to Ireland. However, most arrived with nothing, and once allowed off the quarantine islands, went straight to begging on the street -- but that doesn't rule out an active role by the organization. Every Irishman who survived the voyage was a vote in 7 years, so the burgeoning Irish political clan in New York could have been greasing the wheels quite a bit for passage, without regard to the capacity of their resources to set up immigrants with remotely humane work once they arrived, though the book never mentions so specifically. This makes sense though, because there was a huge backlash among the other portions of the US urban populus against the starving Irish. Standard-of-passage regulations enforced on shipping made the nominal price for passage 7 pounds (because they couldn't be packed in like fried rice). But while thousands therefor took voyage to Canada and then walked south, still more just came through US ports. There must have been pull as well as push. The book is just like "Alright, moving on to my great grandpa in Australia again..."
17. • CommentAuthorfatesaccomplice
    • CommentTimeApr 2nd 2009

     (5230.17)
    Lots of interesting information and logical reasons. Interesting to see Malthus come up. Was that guy real nasty, or just misused. I mean misused in the sense of racial purity idiots using Darwin as a justification for their crimes. If I remember right, one thing Malthus observed was that food production doubles while populations grow exponentially. If shown to be accurate, that's a useful observation. I don't know much about him, came across him in Dickens.
18. •  
      CommentAuthorwarrenellis
    • CommentTimeApr 4th 2009

     (5230.18)
    Malthus... worth reading about. Influential. Not a complete dick. Big holes in his thinking.
19. •  
      CommentAuthorNygaard
    • CommentTimeApr 7th 2009

     (5230.19)
    He pulled the doubled/exponential thing out of his ass (or rather, out of a standard math textbook, because it sounded good), but the basic principle stands - population grows faster than the food available. One of the insights that paved the way for Darwin; all animals breed more offspring than their environment can sustain. The theory of evolution is basically an explanation of why it is so. It's either that, or God hates kittens and puppies and little lost baby birds even more than he hates those darn catamites.
20. • CommentAuthorlooneynerd
    • CommentTimeApr 7th 2009

     (5230.20)
    Actually, I don't think population expands faster than food supply at all.
    
    While humans were hunter-gatherers, there was almost always a surplus food supply. In fact, a surplus food supply allows for faster technological advancement; when surpluses are large, humans develop more quickly as a result of not having to worry so much about food. Look at the countries today that are the leaders in technological development; all of them are countries that either create (the U.S.) or import (Japan) way more than enough food. The U.S., for instance, is only producing something like 40% of the food we could, and there's still way more than enough to go around.
    
    On macro-population levels, at least, there have almost always been surpluses, with a few obvious exceptions like major famines. Even major famines, like the potato famine discussed above, rarely last more than 10 to twenty years, and certainly not more than a generation, and are normally interspersed with long stretches of food surplus.