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same conclusions on the monster's proper fate as the British government did with regard to
Ireland's “superabundant” population in the early nineteenth century: they should be encour-
aged to emigrate if possible, and they should not be allowed to reproduce. Accordingly, the
Creature offers to leave Europe for South America, while Frankenstein later destroys his half-
made bride. “Thou didst seek my extinction,” the Creature cries in his parting words to his
dead creator, “that I might not cause greater wretchedness.” 53
That said, the class politics produced by the Tambora emergency were not all reactionary
and inhumane. Both Robert Peel and Charles Grant, for all their foot dragging and parsimony
in terms of humanitarian relief, were moved by the Irish famine and epidemic of 1816-18
to begin conceiving a modern public health bureaucracy to cope with emergencies on a na-
tional scale. Peel empaneled a national fever committee that evolved under Grant to become
the first Board of Health in the British dominions. In 1817, the British Parliament in turn
passed the landmark Poor Employment Act, which authorized a process for public loans to
fund privately managed infrastructural projects to alleviate unemployment. After 1817, pub-
lic works programs became a standard feature of economic policy. 54 Nineteenth-century Ire-
land, in ways good and bad, served as Britain's social laboratory. “It is no exaggeration to
say,” concludes one historian, “that the welfare state in England was foreshadowed by events
in Ireland in this period.” 55
The same generally progressive trend occurred on the Continent. The French and Prussian
governments spent massively on grain imports in 1816-17 and intervened in the marketplace
by selling their own food reserves at throwaway prices. In northern Germany, private co-op-
eratives, led by the affluent elite, bypassed sluggish authorities to import grain directly from
Russia to feed the starving in their communities. Vitally, for the subsequent long-term sta-
bility of Europe in the nineteenth century, the sheer scale of the humanitarian disaster of
1816-18 initiated the reeducation of the ruling classes in their moral responsibilities to the
broader citizenry. In the process, it weakened the grip of the extreme laissez-faire ideology
that had characterized the first phase of European industrial modernization. Patrick Webb of
Tufts University, an authority on nutrition and food security, has pointed to 1817 as a water-
shed year in the evolution of modern humanitarian theories of governance. Desperate relief
measures adopted during the Tambora emergency “contributed to a growing public accept-
ance of government action in times of crisis, while establishing a variety of viable approaches
that continue to be used today.” 56
Out of the global tragedy of Tambora, then, emerged the rudiments of the modern liberal
state? It would not do to overestimate the pace of progress. In many cases, new welfare
laws were not enforced, and the evolving humanitarian rhetoric of the nineteenth century
remained just that. Moreover, no progressive argument whatever can be made for Britain's
colonial dominions in Asia and Africa, in which racism and Malthusian ideology combined
to inflate the human toll of climate-related disasters throughout the Victorian period. 57 Even
close to home, typhus continued to afflict Ireland long after it had been eradicated from the
rest of Europe. One thing is certain: the haphazard evolution of humanitarian ideals in the
nineteenth century did not advance quickly enough for the twice-damned children of the
Tambora emergency in Ireland, who survived that trauma only to perish in their hundreds of
thousands in the Great Famine of the 1840s.
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