Why were the Irish so dependent on potatoes as a staple food at the time of the Great Famine? Why couldn’t they just have turned to other grains as an alternative to stop more deaths from happening?
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The English suppression of industry, which reached epic proportions in Ireland, was one of the keys to understanding how they worked:
“There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops…
To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection– and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless– was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies.”
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If you look at the former colonies of England you see a pattern: their exports are overwhelmingly of agricultural and material commodities. Not a lot of industrial stuff. They made sure the industrial center of the Empire was England, and they did that forcefully. The former colonies, with the outstanding exception of the US, are still stunted that way.
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