1800-1859 | Afghanistan | Demolishing urban areas | Famine | Ireland | Looting and plunder

10 OCTOBER

ByAlisdare Hickson

KABUL SACKED IN AN ORGY OF FIRE, LOOTING AND ‘WHOLESALE BUTCHERY’

Major General Sir George Pollock – British Library via artuk.org: Sacking of the Great Bazar –  Â© NAM  1020005

[ 10 October 1842 ]

On this day in 1842, British troops used explosives and fire to destroy much of the Afghan capital of Kabul, including the Great Bazar and an adjacent mosque. They also burned down an unknown number of domestic dwellings, slaughtering their owners.

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TROOPS PREVENT STARVING IRISH FROM HALTING CORN EXPORTS

The Famine Memorial in Dublin –
Christine Matthews – CC License – via Geograph

[ 10 October 1846 ]

Deputy Commissary General William Hewetson was responsible for the distribution of famine relief in County Cork during the devastating Irish potato famine of the late 1840s. Today in 1846, he reported to Charles Trevelyan, Britain’s Assistant Secretary at the Treasury, that troops were being dispatched daily into the surrounding countryside to prevent the starving, but enraged, peasantry deliberately immobilising the carts which transported corn to the port for export.1

FOOTNOTES

  1. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 126.

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