Do Boycotts Ever Work?
Pocketbook protest, from tea to sugar
In Sunday’s newsletter, we looked at the movement to boycott sugar because of its close connection to slavery.
That got me wondering — do political boycotts ever work? And why do we call them boycotts in the first place?
Charles Cunningham Boycott was, by most accounts, quite unpopular.
It was the job of this former soldier to manage Lord Erne’s estate in County Mayo, Ireland. This meant that part of his job was to collect rents from the Irish tenants on his boss’ land. Nobody likes a rent-collector, but Boycott was especially unpopular; his stern and stubborn personality earned him a reputation for being an officious jerk.
Lord Erne was a British absentee landlord whose lands happened to be near the epicenter of the so-called Irish Land War (which was less a war than a period of strident protest). Irish people had been frustrated by British domination of their land for quite some time, and tensions grew as economic deprivation and famine took their toll.
The Land War began when tenant farmers gathered in County Mayo on April 20, 1879, to protest the collection of rent in a year with poor harvests. They formed a Land League, which agitated to make the system fairer. And until the government gave in to its demands, the League declared that Irish tenants should pay no rent.
Though the rent strike never quite took hold, many tenants pushed for a better arrangement. Lord Erne’s tenants asked for a 25% reduction in their rent payments. Boycott countered with an offer of 10%. Negotiations fell apart, and the tenants decided not to pay. When Boycott sent his men out to collect rent, they were ignored and harassed. The local priest, Father O’Malley, who helped to lead the resistance, encouraged his parishioners to isolate and inconvenience their enemies. Social pressure drove Boycott’s workers to quit their jobs or simply refuse to do much at work. Boycott was left with no one to bring in the harvest.
Father O’Malley’s parishioners apparently struggled with his preferred term for these actions — ostracism, an ancient Greek term. So he suggested that they turn their adversary’s name into a verb — people should simply “boycott” their enemies.
Boycott wrote a letter to the Times in London complaining about his treatment at the hands of his neighbors:
On the ensuing day, September 23rd, the people collected in crowds upon my farm, and some hundred or so came up to my house and ordered off, under threats of ulterior consequences, all my farm labourers, workmen, and stablemen, commanding them never to work for me again… The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house, and I have just received a message from the post mistress to say that the telegraph messenger was stopped and threatened on the road when bringing out a message to me and that she does not think it safe to send any telegrams which may come for me in the future for fear they should be abstracted and the messenger injured. My farm is public property; the people wander over it with impunity. My crops are trampled upon, carried away in quantities, and destroyed wholesale. The locks on my gates are smashed, the gates thrown open, the walls thrown down, and the stock driven out on the roads. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country. I say nothing about the danger to my own life, which is apparent to anybody who knows the country.
Captain Boycott was effectively isolated for a while, but his letter caught the attention of the government and its Protestant sympathizers. They organized a “relief expedition” that harvested Boycott’s turnip crop and protected his family. But the boycotts — now a generic verb — continued across Ireland. The unrest forced the government to pass a new Land Law that gave tenants more rights, including stable rents and part ownership of the land.
Boycott fled Ireland, escorted to safety by British soldiers. He died a few years later at age 65, destined to be remembered only for the most unpleasant incident of his life, with his name having become a synonym for the way that people opposed him.
Though Charles Boycott’s Irish opponents did far more than refuse to buy support his business, his name came to stand for the practice of refusing “to buy a product or take part in an activity as a way of expressing strong disapproval.” What we now call boycotts actually existed before the domineering Captain Boycott ever knocked on a door to collect rent. This tactic is an effective tool in the protester’s arsenal — but only under certain conditions.
Americans may have invented the boycott about a hundred years before the tactic got a name. In 1767, somebody posted a bit of doggerel entitled “Address to the LADIES” in the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser. It encouraged colonists to stop buying British goods and rely instead on home-grown products.
According to the poet, this would make women both more patriotic and more attractive to the opposite sex:
