Ireland appears as both a site of British colonial rule and the setting for a pointed indictment of free trade: during famine, grain was shipped out while people starved, and the resulting emigration helped depress wages in Britain. In a conversation with Bella Baxter, Harry Astley’s account makes the economic consequences inseparable from the political choices behind them.

Land, tenancy, and dependence on potatoes

Astley says that eight out of ten Irish people lived on potatoes. Poor soil left many peasants with few alternatives, while money earned through other work went toward rent. The landlords, descended from English invaders and conquerors, owned the richer land where corn was grown. The contrast between tenants dependent on a precarious crop and landlords controlling fertile ground gives the famine a social structure as well as a natural cause.

About thirty-five years before the conversation, a sudden disease destroyed the potatoes and peasants began to starve. Astley describes food stocks being moved out of Ireland during famine because people without money could not pay for them. The crisis was therefore not simply a shortage of food: the presence of grain did not ensure that the starving could obtain it.

The ports and the logic of free trade

The British Parliament debated a proposal to close Ireland’s ports until Irish grain had been eaten by the Irish population. The proposal was defeated because it would interfere with free trade. Soldiers were then sent to ensure that the grain reached the ships. In Astley’s telling, the policy’s priority is stark: protecting the movement of commerce takes precedence over keeping food in a famine-stricken country.

He connects that decision to the scale of the catastrophe. Nearly a million people starved to death, while one and a half million left Ireland. Those who reached Britain worked for such low wages that British workers’ wages could be undercut, allowing industries to make more money. Emigration thus appears not only as a consequence of famine but also as a source of cheap labor that benefited the receiving economy.

Ireland in Astley’s imperial argument

Earlier, Astley presents religious accommodation as a practical means of governing the British Empire. He supports the Church of England in England and the Church of Scotland in Scotland, and argues that rule over a large part of the globe would be harder if local religions were opposed. Ireland enters this argument as a colony whose control, he suggests, might have been easier if Catholicism had been made official and its priests enlisted in support of British authority; he adds that Ulster’s inhabitants would need a separate corner for themselves.

This hypothetical reveals the instrumental character of Astley’s imperial outlook: religion matters to him as a means of maintaining political control. His treatment of Ireland also sits uneasily beside his later account of the famine. The same conversation that exposes the consequences of British policy presents the colony as a problem to be managed, while laying bare how imperial and commercial priorities could override the needs of its people.

Bella’s challenge

After hearing Astley’s account of the famine, Bella asks whether he would have voted to close the ports if he had been in Parliament. She says she would not have bitten him for answering yes, though she would have spat in his face. Astley replies quietly that, knowing he would have to face her afterward, he would not have dared vote against the proposal.

The exchange shifts the discussion from a past parliamentary decision to the responsibility of the person recounting it. Astley’s answer acknowledges Bella’s moral judgment without claiming that he would have opposed the policy on principle. Ireland’s famine is therefore not presented only as economic history; within the scene, it becomes the test Bella applies to the reasoning and conscience of her companion.