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Of Potatoes, Ottomans, and the Irish

Of Potatoes, Ottomans, and the Irish

Last updated on: January 6, 2026 at 9:28 am by Dan Peterson

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Of Potatoes, Ottomans, and the Irish 2026-01-06T09:28:13-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Winter Quarters, on the Missouri River in Nebraska territory, where Latter-day Saint refugees, led by Brigham Young and the Twelve, spent the winter of 1846-1847 (Wikimedia Commons public domain image))

My wife and I had a very useful meeting this morning with our friends at Red Brick Film Works with regard to the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming series of short Becoming Brigham docudramas. I’m very excited about this project. On Monday, 26 January, we will begin to release an online episode from it each and every week. Forty episodes are already pretty much complete. It’s possible that the number of episodes will eventually reach into the mid-70s — which means that the episodes will run for nearly a year and a half. We hope that you’ll enjoy Becoming Brigham, that you’ll profit from it — I’ve certainly learned quite a bit from the making of it, thus far — and that you’ll call the attention of other people to it. There will be no charge for watching it. More details are yet to come.

An engraving of Istanbul in 1856, just four years after the end of the “Irish Potato Famine”

(Wikimedia Commons public domain)

Potatoes came to Europe in the sixteenth century, brought by Spanish explorers from South America (Peru/Bolivia) after the conquest of the Inca Empire, with cultivation beginning in Spain around the 1570s and spreading to the British Isles shortly after, though widespread adoption took much longer. They had become a vital, nutritious staple by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owing to their ease of growth and their caloric value, which significantly impacted European diets and populations.

The Irish Potato Famine — also known as the Great Hunger or, simply, as the Famine — lasted from 1845 to 1852. It was a period of mass starvation and accompanying disease that had a major impact not only on Irish society and but on European and American history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, which means that it had an indirect effect on the relative linguistic make-up of Ireland and on its literary culture.

The Irish potato crop in 1845 had seemed healthy enough, even robust, when it was first taken from the ground. Within a day or two of the harvest, however, rot set in. Potatoes that looked firm and edible turned black and then disintegrated into a stinking, liquid mess. And nobody knew why, nor how to remedy the situation.

Ireland’s population had surged from 3.2 million in 1750 to eight million or so within the space of about ninety years — at precisely the same time that the amount of land available for Irish tenants to farm had been falling sharply. Wealthy Protestant landowners were seizing and enclosing what had once been common land, thus reducing the acreage that was available to Catholic peasant farmers. (Have you ever wondered where the historically strong antipathy between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics came from?) By 1845, at least a quarter of Irish families eked out their sustenance from tiny plots of five acres or less, which in turn obliged them to devote all of their land to the cultivation of the highest-yielding, most nutritious crop — which was the potato. By 1845, potatoes were not only the staple Irish foodstuff but, in many cases, the only food sustaining the Irish population.

On the eve of the Famine, that population was about 8.5 million; by 1901, it was just 4.4 million. During the Great Hunger, roughly one million people died and roughly 1.5 million more fled the country, which caused Ireland’s population to fall by nearly a quarter by 1871. Some towns were almost depopulated, with their numbers falling by as much as 67%. By 1855, at least 2.1 million people had left Ireland, perhaps the greatest exodus from a single island in human history. The population decline continued for a century, and the massive influx of Irish immigrants in places such as Boston and New York, which caused social strife in America, dates to this period. Even today, the entire combined population of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is somewhere just over seven million — substantially lower, in other words, than it was in 1845.

The direct cause of the Famine was the infection of potato crops throughout Europe and even, to some extent, in North America, by a “blight” that is now known to have been a fungus. Elsewhere in Europe, the infection caused 100,000 deaths and was a major factor in the popular unrest that culminated in the European Revolutions of 1848. But there were significant indirect causes, as well, including the system of absentee landlordism and over-dependence on a single-crop dependence. In the 1840s, Ireland seems to have been largely for the benefit of its elite landowning class.

Curiously, large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the Great Hunger — which is one of the reasons why some historians refuse to call it a famine — and the refusal of the government in London to forbid such exports (they had been banned during previous food shortages) contributed mightily to anti-British sentiment and, eventually, to a successful campaign for Irish independence. Ireland wasn’t really isolated, dependent because of distance upon only its own failing resources. It was situated directly adjacent to the heart of the British Empire, which was at the time the richest and most powerful state on earth.

All of that, though, is a lead-up to the story that I will briefly mention here:

To this day, evidently, many Irish loathe the very name of Queen Victoria. (She is apparently still sometimes called “the Famine Queen.”) Why? Because, while the British government was doing essentially nothing to help, they believe that the immeasurably wealthy British monarch, in her capacity as a private citizen, contributed a mere £5 to Irish famine relief — at a time when, in the space of just two months, Irish emigrants in the slums of New York collected more than $326,000 (about £9 million today) to send home. Even the Choctaw tribe of Native Americans, ravaged by disease and restricted to a reservation in Oklahoma, donated $710. In one version of the tale, on the same day that the Queen made her miserly donation, she gave a substantially larger amount to an English home for dogs.

Enter now Sultan Abdülmecid I, ruler of the Ottoman Empire with its capital in Istanbul. (His name, equivalent to the Arabic ‘Abd al-Majid, is pronounced Abd al-MaJEED.)

It’s generally accepted that the sultan sent a personal donation of £1,000 to London — which is pretty generous in itself, considering that there were no real connections between Catholic Ireland and Muslim Turkey. Some accounts, however, suggest that he did — or tried to do — much more than that. In one version of the story, the sultan intended to give as much as £10,000 [£1 million now], but was advised that it would be diplomatically unwise were he to donate significantly more for Irish aid than Ireland’s own monarch, Queen Victoria, had given. In a variation on that account, Abdülmecid responded by lowering his gift to a more diplomatically acceptable sum – while surreptitiously sending additional help via several Turkish grain ships, which were quietly sent to unload badly needed foodstuffs at a port on the eastern Irish coast. Some even say that Abdülmecid’s sailors had to run a Royal Navy blockade in order to reach Irish land. As one of the characters in the Irish novelist James Joyce’s Ulysses puts it,

Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the Sassenach [Englishman] tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro.

There is much about this story of Ottoman aid (and of Victoria’s alleged miserliness) that is uncertain or unclear or contradicted in different accounts. For an additional retelling, see “An Irish Tale of Hunger and the Sultan,” in Aramco World (January/February 2015).

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