Food Sovereignty, the Irish Homestead, and the First World War

Abstract

At the outbreak of the First World War, George Russell (Æ) published a series of editorials in the Irish Homestead calling for Ireland to secure food reserves against the demands he predicted Britain would make upon Irish agricultural sectors to fuel the war effort. Irish agriculture, Russell writes, is part of a peculiar market shaped by empire: ‘Ireland is a food producing nation’; and yet ‘a machinery of export […] automatically deducts’ Irish cattle, pork, butter, milk, poultry, and eggs, ‘week by week’, while ‘week by week’ bacon, meat, flour, and other goods are imported. The machinery of war, it is implied, could easily disrupt these trade channels and trigger a scarcity crisis. Such an event would not be caused by an actual food shortage but by the unpredictable pressures of wartime markets, in which what Russell calls ‘famine prices’ would deplete food reserves. By analyzing Russell's strategic deployment of the language of colonial economics, this article argues that Russell recirculates the cultural memory of Ireland's Great Famine within Revivalist discourse in order to protest the conscription of Ireland's food reserves, rallying support for co-operatives as a matter of national defense. Co-operation dispels perceptions of Ireland as a quaint backwater of sleepy farms and reveals a competing vision of rural modernity that contrasts sharply with the terrifying military technologies and sense of a traumatic break with the past that typically anchor understandings of modernity in the era. For Russell, securing food sovereignty through self-sufficient, decentralized cooperatives could secure political sovereignty for the modern Irish nation, providing a blueprint for a new social order as geopolitical categories were re-constellated by global conflict.