WI: No Irish Famine?

The big issue for the world I would see is the impact the famine had on British politics. It absolutely destroyed the whigs as a political force and put an end to their protectionist/laissez-faire economic policies, helping bring in the liberals.

Not landing such a blow on the whigs and things might work out rather differently.

Excuse me, but the Whigs were the Liberals. The Whigs were laissez-faire, but also Free Traders, which the Tories opposed. The PM, Sir Robert Peel, had become a Free Trader - but in breaking with Tory tradition he split his party and made way for a Whig ministry which lasted six years. Whig, Liberal, or Peelite PMs were in power for 18 of the next 20 years.
 
And that's the real root of th problem: the famine was so bad because Ireland was so poor and much of the economy was still sustance farming, mostly of potatoes. The real solution would be to industrialize the Irish economy, something which is still only gradually happening today. I'm not sure how, but I bet there's a PoD which will do it. While a factory worker in the 1840s didn't lead a charmed life, it was certainly better than a sustance farmer in Galway.

potatoes were not a cash crop. the main cash crop was wheat and other grains and were sold to pay the rent one the land. potatoes were the food for the tenant farmers. potatoes allowed a smaller amount of land to be used to feed the tenant farmers allowing more land to used to grow grain that had been kept at artificial high prices by the Corn laws.
For landlords the best return in investment was to have tenant farmers grow grain. Industry was not as profitable to the was little interest in while the corn laws kept the price of grain high.
 
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amphibulous

Banned
But absentee landlords were worse, because they collected their rents in Ireland, and spent them in England. They literally drained money out of the country.

I was answering a specific point about INVESTMENT, not spending.

As for personal spending: non-absentee landlords would have employed some more servants and kept busy more Irish shopkeepers.. selling things that would probably have been made elsewhere. Look at the economy of the US South for a similar pattern.

What I'd be interested to know is how much money was lost in taxation.. But then taxation was very low in this period.
 
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