John Stuart Mill and the Politics of the Irish Land Question

Abstract

The Irish famine in the mid-1840s caused by the failure of the potato crop called John Stuart Mill's attention to the agricultural and economic problems of Ireland. In this paper, I examine Mill's engagement in the Irish land question in the light of contemporary discussion on the Irish national character and the Irish question. In the first section, I examine what early-nineteenth-century intellectuals thought of the Irish question and "Irish national character." In the second section, I present an account of Mill's views on the Irish condition and his proposed solution for the Irish land question, which he approached from both economic and ethological points of view. In other words, his analysis of the Irish land question was underpinned by an interest in the relationship between the formation of national character and the state of the society, and political institutions. He stressed how artificial social systems, including the land system, could contribute to the formation of national character. This section shows that both his diagnosis of the Irish distress and his proposed remedy for it were grounded in the theoretical views of man and society that had been gradually developed in the 1830s and early 1840s.