In the first half of the 19th
century the Irish economy was integrated to its cross-channel counterpart to
service the grain deficit in England caused by enclosures and the industrial
revolution which rendered the world a progressive anomaly; the first ever
country to have a higher urban than rural population represented by a flight
from the English countryside into the manufacturing districts. Thus the 'dark
satanic mills' and the suffering of the English working classes railed against
in the pages of Engels and brought to life for us so well by Dickens.
Simultaneously In Ireland, to attend the English shortfall in grain (with less
hands on the land & more mouths to feed in the towns) subsidies were
provided to entice Irish landlords to export grain overseas thus keeping its
price down in England. A third of an English working man's wages were spent on
bread at this time (1830's/40's) and the protectionist Corn laws artificially
propped up its price further by slapping exorbitant tariffs on all foreign
imports bar Irish ones. Thus you had frequent destabilising bread riots and the
rise of organised English working class and middle class agitation (the
Chartists and the Anti-Corn law League) who both called for Corn Law abolition.
Back in Ireland, the typical Irish tenant was now dividing half his plot for the production of potatoes which he'd consume and the other half for the production of grain (barley, wheat, oats) which, in a barter economy, and in lieu of cash, he'd give the landlord in payment of rent. This was "Trevelyan's corn", ostensibly held and marketed by the landlord under the protective shroud of laissez faire but which wound up in the ports of Bristol and Liverpool to dampen predicted English working class unrest. Potato blight was a European wide phenomenon, tightening food supplies everywhere and was a primary causative factor in the 1848 revolutions. Thus Peel's first act is not to close Irish ports as O' Connell wanted but to dismantle the Corn Laws and open the entire UK to cheap American grain for the twofold purpose of lowering prices in England and Ireland. To keep this short and within the parameters of the discussion it is enough to note that the typical small Irish cottier holding ten acres or less scarcely cared or understood why the grain he'd grown and plucked with his own hands had to be bundled up and shipped overseas other than it was a tyranny which would likely consume him.
Hence you have that almost primeval rage which burst out in the "Big House" burnings during the War of Independence and the Civil War. Historians will point to the justifications issued by combatants at the time; that they were regarded by IRA brigades as 'strategic military centres' for Crown forces, or the 'homes of well-known collaborators' or Free State senators (as Lynch would have it), a counter-reprisal for Tan outrages (Tom Barry) and even the orders of IRA GHQ in July 1921 which directly led to some 40 odd burnings seems to turn the scales towards a larger (non-locally influenced) overall strategic military purpose but at the end of the day its difficult to divorce yourself from the fact that the impetus to burn so many to the ground was spawned by an in-bred implacable hatred to everything that they represented; the rule of a 'British garrison' Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendency. Many of the burnings had nothing to do with the 'conflict' but related to reclaiming land perceived to be rightfully theirs on foot of previous 'dispossessions' but this only reinforces the general point that it was the simmering passions underneath which determined actions.
Are there any parallels to be found between what happened to the Irish gentry south of the border during the War of Independence and the recent ZANU-led Chimurengan land war?
Lots of parallels with Zimbabwe in my estimation; in both instances you had skewered patterns of land distribution with a solitary ethnic group monopolising the spoils. The big house burnings despite the ostensible reasons given by the IRA (collaborators, military advantage, counter-reprisals) were fuelled by a multi-generational mistrust compounded by dispossession, famine, land wars and divergent views on how to resolve the 'national question'. Likewise, Zimbabwe's white minority occupied land in the most productive regions while the native black population whose ancestors had been trundled off at gunpoint by Rhodes brigands and forced to reside in the most unyielding soils ("Tribal Trust Lands") finally grew unstoppably restless and via the War Veteran's Association re-claimed forcibly what had been theirs all along. There was a Donor's Conference in Harare (1998)which should have impelled Britain to honour the Lancaster House stipulations and finance land reform but they of course reneged citing the usual distortions of cronyism; this is in contrast to the Tories in Ireland, who via the Land Purchase Acts, put a cap on a potential agrarian time-bomb.
The following Kiplingesque reduction was once offered to me by way of appraising current Zimbabwean difficulties and may be taken as broadly representative of threatened white farmers in the African southern cone;
"They never owned the land, you see -- the chief did. The tribal chief took from them, the white chief gave them food, shelter and pocket-money. Now they have chiefs of a minority faction of the Shona tribe ruling them, their country is being sold out to new Chinese masters."
Really, it reminds me of Sir John Davies carving out the Ulster plantation and converting the natives into 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. They didn't own their land either, the chiefs did, O' Neill and O' Donnell, yet what a tale each could tell of every rood of ground, horsing back through the generations "for hours on end" according to Davis, summing up their 'tribal' lineage and what lay where and who was entitled to which rung on what ladder of the derbfine pecking order. They were integrated too, "civilized" and boxed off into tidy little tenancies that could be taxed and counted - and who knows many were probably glad of it, but as is often the case, blood is thicker than water, in time they found their equilibrium, consorted for equal rights and, at length, threw off the hung-dog Uncle Tom-foolery. The white chief gave them food, shelter and money. Did he give them the vote too when they asked for it? No, remarkably, Smith in all his arrogance drove them into the Bush for it; called them terrorists and communists (as you do!) before being dragged screaming into Lancaster & plopped down to meet his betters.
Their country's being sold out to their new Chinese masters? Here's another comparison; Ireland was sold out too at independence, to the "Anglo-Irish Capitalists". Look what's happened to us? We've never recovered from the disaster - hmph!! A mature Connolly, donning multiple hats, had the foresight to call them the "national bourgeoise" - more than bullets were being bit here, but still, he knew all the same, like Rover chasing his own tail, its all a bit tiring in the end. Chinese have first fruits clearly; they gave ZANU guns when the rest of the world shunned them. Besides which, jumping through hoops to satisfy the IMF/WB brood of vampires monitoring SAP conditionality would tax the patience of any man; especially when the neoliberal mantra is being force fed amidst an incoming agrarian tsunami which the whole crooked pile of them refuse to dignify with an investigation.
Six million Shona and Ndebele farmers eking a living on the scraps of the native reserves (average 3 hectare a piece) while 4,500 (predominantly white) commercial farmers monopolise 70% of the country's arable land - twenty years after "independence". Farce and a scandal of Hague-like proportions to which they should all be trotted like whipped dogs. Clare Shortt among them, who had the temerity to disown all Britain's obligations vis-à-vis the lapse of the ten year "willing seller-willing buyer" clause in the same breath as saying her Irish roots gave her cause to commiserate with the country's gross structural disparities.
Talk about cleaning your hands of Empire!
Mugabe couldn't have stopped the WVA even if he tried - and if he did, his people would have never forgiven him.
So, in both instances a disproportionate level of wealth and political power was held by a colonially engrafted elite ethnic minority centred primarily on the possession of land - white Rhodesians in the one instance, Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency in the other - which in the Zimbabwe case wasn't addressed and so "exploded", as we're all aware, whereas in the Irish instance it was ameliorated somewhat by successive land bills under Gladstone in the 1880's and by the long pre-War Tory administrations thereafter, but still led to multiple IRA-led big house burnings, such was the accumulated endemic frustration. Unlike these (arguably more enlightened) past British administrations, Blair's Labour disowned Britain's historic, and at the time of independence, fully acknowledged responsibility to fund a package of redistributive land acts which would have taken the wind out of the WVA sails but declined to do so - most notably at the Donor's conference in Harare.
I'd imagine in the case of South Africa as in the rest of the Southern Cone (Namibia springs to mind) the Chimurenga will simply expand by degrees and swallow it all up, the forces of cohesion across the axes of containment (ANC/Big Biz) appear too brittle and ill-managed, possibly a mutually acknowledged lack of serious intent on both sides, but likewise too, there's that brick wall of incomprehension which springs sadly, as is often the case, from congenital rather than any culturally acquired impediments.
So, as the Soweto-type grassroots radicals, scanning for the inevitable chinks, will exploit as best advantage may find, its hard to see truly a long-term stopgap as the Shona consolidation when transformed, as is inevitable, into that sturdier and much longed for House of Stone, free from aforesaid predatory impulses, while backed ever stronger by US/Chinese Treasury Bills as latter eclipses formers trade & ever-present need for them to supplement domestic grain shortages via contested African land banks hoovered up then as consolidating strangling political pincer on a diminishing South Africa; the cracks multi-radial, up-ended, then gone.
Back in Ireland, the typical Irish tenant was now dividing half his plot for the production of potatoes which he'd consume and the other half for the production of grain (barley, wheat, oats) which, in a barter economy, and in lieu of cash, he'd give the landlord in payment of rent. This was "Trevelyan's corn", ostensibly held and marketed by the landlord under the protective shroud of laissez faire but which wound up in the ports of Bristol and Liverpool to dampen predicted English working class unrest. Potato blight was a European wide phenomenon, tightening food supplies everywhere and was a primary causative factor in the 1848 revolutions. Thus Peel's first act is not to close Irish ports as O' Connell wanted but to dismantle the Corn Laws and open the entire UK to cheap American grain for the twofold purpose of lowering prices in England and Ireland. To keep this short and within the parameters of the discussion it is enough to note that the typical small Irish cottier holding ten acres or less scarcely cared or understood why the grain he'd grown and plucked with his own hands had to be bundled up and shipped overseas other than it was a tyranny which would likely consume him.
Hence you have that almost primeval rage which burst out in the "Big House" burnings during the War of Independence and the Civil War. Historians will point to the justifications issued by combatants at the time; that they were regarded by IRA brigades as 'strategic military centres' for Crown forces, or the 'homes of well-known collaborators' or Free State senators (as Lynch would have it), a counter-reprisal for Tan outrages (Tom Barry) and even the orders of IRA GHQ in July 1921 which directly led to some 40 odd burnings seems to turn the scales towards a larger (non-locally influenced) overall strategic military purpose but at the end of the day its difficult to divorce yourself from the fact that the impetus to burn so many to the ground was spawned by an in-bred implacable hatred to everything that they represented; the rule of a 'British garrison' Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendency. Many of the burnings had nothing to do with the 'conflict' but related to reclaiming land perceived to be rightfully theirs on foot of previous 'dispossessions' but this only reinforces the general point that it was the simmering passions underneath which determined actions.
Are there any parallels to be found between what happened to the Irish gentry south of the border during the War of Independence and the recent ZANU-led Chimurengan land war?
Lots of parallels with Zimbabwe in my estimation; in both instances you had skewered patterns of land distribution with a solitary ethnic group monopolising the spoils. The big house burnings despite the ostensible reasons given by the IRA (collaborators, military advantage, counter-reprisals) were fuelled by a multi-generational mistrust compounded by dispossession, famine, land wars and divergent views on how to resolve the 'national question'. Likewise, Zimbabwe's white minority occupied land in the most productive regions while the native black population whose ancestors had been trundled off at gunpoint by Rhodes brigands and forced to reside in the most unyielding soils ("Tribal Trust Lands") finally grew unstoppably restless and via the War Veteran's Association re-claimed forcibly what had been theirs all along. There was a Donor's Conference in Harare (1998)which should have impelled Britain to honour the Lancaster House stipulations and finance land reform but they of course reneged citing the usual distortions of cronyism; this is in contrast to the Tories in Ireland, who via the Land Purchase Acts, put a cap on a potential agrarian time-bomb.
The following Kiplingesque reduction was once offered to me by way of appraising current Zimbabwean difficulties and may be taken as broadly representative of threatened white farmers in the African southern cone;
"They never owned the land, you see -- the chief did. The tribal chief took from them, the white chief gave them food, shelter and pocket-money. Now they have chiefs of a minority faction of the Shona tribe ruling them, their country is being sold out to new Chinese masters."
Really, it reminds me of Sir John Davies carving out the Ulster plantation and converting the natives into 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. They didn't own their land either, the chiefs did, O' Neill and O' Donnell, yet what a tale each could tell of every rood of ground, horsing back through the generations "for hours on end" according to Davis, summing up their 'tribal' lineage and what lay where and who was entitled to which rung on what ladder of the derbfine pecking order. They were integrated too, "civilized" and boxed off into tidy little tenancies that could be taxed and counted - and who knows many were probably glad of it, but as is often the case, blood is thicker than water, in time they found their equilibrium, consorted for equal rights and, at length, threw off the hung-dog Uncle Tom-foolery. The white chief gave them food, shelter and money. Did he give them the vote too when they asked for it? No, remarkably, Smith in all his arrogance drove them into the Bush for it; called them terrorists and communists (as you do!) before being dragged screaming into Lancaster & plopped down to meet his betters.
Their country's being sold out to their new Chinese masters? Here's another comparison; Ireland was sold out too at independence, to the "Anglo-Irish Capitalists". Look what's happened to us? We've never recovered from the disaster - hmph!! A mature Connolly, donning multiple hats, had the foresight to call them the "national bourgeoise" - more than bullets were being bit here, but still, he knew all the same, like Rover chasing his own tail, its all a bit tiring in the end. Chinese have first fruits clearly; they gave ZANU guns when the rest of the world shunned them. Besides which, jumping through hoops to satisfy the IMF/WB brood of vampires monitoring SAP conditionality would tax the patience of any man; especially when the neoliberal mantra is being force fed amidst an incoming agrarian tsunami which the whole crooked pile of them refuse to dignify with an investigation.
Six million Shona and Ndebele farmers eking a living on the scraps of the native reserves (average 3 hectare a piece) while 4,500 (predominantly white) commercial farmers monopolise 70% of the country's arable land - twenty years after "independence". Farce and a scandal of Hague-like proportions to which they should all be trotted like whipped dogs. Clare Shortt among them, who had the temerity to disown all Britain's obligations vis-à-vis the lapse of the ten year "willing seller-willing buyer" clause in the same breath as saying her Irish roots gave her cause to commiserate with the country's gross structural disparities.
Talk about cleaning your hands of Empire!
Mugabe couldn't have stopped the WVA even if he tried - and if he did, his people would have never forgiven him.
So, in both instances a disproportionate level of wealth and political power was held by a colonially engrafted elite ethnic minority centred primarily on the possession of land - white Rhodesians in the one instance, Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency in the other - which in the Zimbabwe case wasn't addressed and so "exploded", as we're all aware, whereas in the Irish instance it was ameliorated somewhat by successive land bills under Gladstone in the 1880's and by the long pre-War Tory administrations thereafter, but still led to multiple IRA-led big house burnings, such was the accumulated endemic frustration. Unlike these (arguably more enlightened) past British administrations, Blair's Labour disowned Britain's historic, and at the time of independence, fully acknowledged responsibility to fund a package of redistributive land acts which would have taken the wind out of the WVA sails but declined to do so - most notably at the Donor's conference in Harare.
I'd imagine in the case of South Africa as in the rest of the Southern Cone (Namibia springs to mind) the Chimurenga will simply expand by degrees and swallow it all up, the forces of cohesion across the axes of containment (ANC/Big Biz) appear too brittle and ill-managed, possibly a mutually acknowledged lack of serious intent on both sides, but likewise too, there's that brick wall of incomprehension which springs sadly, as is often the case, from congenital rather than any culturally acquired impediments.
So, as the Soweto-type grassroots radicals, scanning for the inevitable chinks, will exploit as best advantage may find, its hard to see truly a long-term stopgap as the Shona consolidation when transformed, as is inevitable, into that sturdier and much longed for House of Stone, free from aforesaid predatory impulses, while backed ever stronger by US/Chinese Treasury Bills as latter eclipses formers trade & ever-present need for them to supplement domestic grain shortages via contested African land banks hoovered up then as consolidating strangling political pincer on a diminishing South Africa; the cracks multi-radial, up-ended, then gone.
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