3. Ireland, 1880: The strange and spirited legacy of the Boycott family.

“Boycott” is a widely understood form of social, economic, and political action. Everybody now takes the word for granted. But where does the word come from?

Once upon a time there was Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. He was a much-disliked land agent for Lord Erne, an absentee landlord in County Mayo in the west of British-ruled Ireland.

On September 23, 1880, “as if by one sudden impulse” (in the words of the Connaught Telegraph), Boycott’s servants walked out on him, in protest of unjust rents and evictions. Boycott and his family found themselves obliged to milk their own cows, shoe their own horses, and till their own fields. Shopkeepers refused to serve Boycott and his family. The post office stopped delivering mail to him. Boycott was isolated and powerless to retaliate, to the dismay of his supporters. In London, an editorial in the Times complained: “A more frightful picture of triumphant anarchy has never been presented in any community pretending to be civilized and subject to the law.”

One of the organizers of the action, James Redpath, realized that no single word existed to describe this successful form of ostracism. To bolster the political impact of these actions, he decided that needed to change. As Redpath recounts in his 1881 memoir Talks About Ireland, he asked the sympathetic priest, Father John O’Malley, for advice: “[O’Malley] looked down, tapped his big forehead, and said: ‘How would it be to call it to Boycott him?’”

In Captain Boycott and the Irish, Joyce Marlow describes how a pro-English volunteer force came to help the beleaguered Boycott, guarded by a detachment of a thousand soldiers. Their supplies included fourteen gallons of whiskey, thirty pounds of tobacco, and four foghorns. After a few weeks of digging vegetables in the rain, however, they abandoned Boycott once more. Boycott fled to England. He never returned. Eventually, Ireland won its independence.

Meanwhile, the name of an obscure land agent in the west of Ireland has gone global in the dictionaries. General Augusto Pinochet’s regime suffered from those who were ready to boicotear Chilean apples and wine in protest against repression by the military junta in Chile in the 1970s. Poles protesting against the Communist imposition of martial law in 1981 declared a bojkot of the television news. Russians talk of boikotirovat, and the French declare un boycott. And all because of some local difficulties involving the Irish turnip harvest of 1880.

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson adapted this article for YES! Magazine from their book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World © 2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, Union Square Press, a division of Sterling Publishing Co,. Inc. (Facebook/SmallActsofResistance).

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